Voice onset time and closure duration of word-initial voiceless plosives in Pidgin conversation

Abstract

Hawai‘i is home to many languages, including an English-lexified creole, known locally as Pidgin. Despite much work on the development of Pidgin, little is known about the acoustic properties of Pidgin consonants. This talk presents results from an analysis of word-initial plosives produced by eight speakers of Pidgin across two age groups, investigating what factors influence VOT and closure duration in the plosives. The data were analyzed using linear regression models with by-speaker random intercepts. Results demonstrate that VOT in word-initial plosives tends to be shorter in Pidgin than in English, with mean duration values nearly half those reported for English in Yao (2007). The effects of social and linguistic factors, however, tend to be similar (e.g., shorter VOT for older speakers, VOT for /k/ is longer than for /t/ or /p/). Results also indicate that VOT is significantly shorter both for words of Hawaiian origin (β =-0.01, t(289)=-2.0, and p<0.05) and—in a separate model fit to a subset of the data with only non-Hawaiian words—highly frequent words (β=-0.01, t(216)=-4.2, and p<0.001). In contrast, no factors tested significantly predicted closure duration. Taken together, results demonstrate that a combination of linguistic, social, and probabilistic factors influence VOT in Pidgin.