Glottalisation, coda voicing, and phrase position in Australian English

Abstract

Glottalisation is an important cue to coda stop voicelessness, particularly for younger Australian English speakers who utilise glottalisation more than older speakers, suggesting a recent sound change. However, most previous studies of glottalisation in this variety of English have focussed on single word utterances, raising questions about whether glottalisation in those studies may have been prosodically conditioned rather than specific to the coda stop: Could the observed effect have been due to phrase-final creaky voice, which is acoustically similar to coda-related glottalisation? This study therefore explored the differential effects of phrase position on the production of glottalisation. Phrase-medially (where phrase-final creaky voice is not expected to occur), results confirmed previous findings that glottalisation cues coda stop voicelessness and that it does so more frequently for younger compared to older speakers. In phrase-final position, rates of glottalisation increased, but older speakers appeared more similar to younger speakers in use of glottalisation, suggesting that the change towards the increased use of glottalisation may be nearing completion in this prosodic position. Younger speakers appear to represent a more advanced stage of the change extending the use of glottalisation from phrase-final to phrase-medial position.

Fifty years of change to prevocalic definite article allomorphy in Australian English

“…The data were also labelled for the presence of glottalisation in the V 1 #V 2 hiatus. Although we observed variation in type and duration of glottalisation, ranging from a brief period of glottalised (creaky) phonation at the hiatus juncture to a full glottal stop with a closure phase analogous to a (voiceless) oral stop closure (and in all but a few cases glottalised phonation on either side of the glottal stop closure – maximum closure duration 168 ms), we do not differentiate between types of glottalisation in this study (see also Davidson & Erker 2014; Garellek 2015; Penney et al 2020, 2021). Rather, all items that exhibited evidence of glottalisation between these two extremes were treated as items in which glottalisation was used as a hiatus resolution strategy.…”

“…It is interesting that the deployment of glottalisation is becoming common in AusE in a number of contexts including the implementation of coda voicelessness (Penney et al 2018(Penney et al , 2020(Penney et al , 2021, the use of creaky voice quality (Dallaston & Docherty 2019, White et al 2021, and in hiatus management (Cox et al 2014b;Yuen et al 2017Yuen et al , 2018. A fruitful area for future research could be to explore the intriguing relationship between these various segmental, sociophonetic, and prosodic uses for glottalisation in the phonological toolkit.…”

“…If young people generalise the deployment of glottalisation to other hiatus contexts, such as when the definite article is followed by vowel-initial words, there would be less incentive for /ðiː/ to be used because a glide would not surface. In addition, glottalisation is also more common in younger AusE speakers to signal coda /t/ voicelessness compared to older speakers (Penney et al 2018, 2020, 2021). These results suggest that younger speakers of AusE are making extensive and increasing use of glottalisation, providing a new tool in their phonological repertoire that can be deployed in a range of contexts.…”