CODA GLOTTALIZATION IN AMERICAN ENGLISH

Glottalization of coda /t, p / is a common process in American English. This study uses acoustic mea-sures to determine when coda glottalization occurs in the conversational speech of the Buckeye Cor-pus. Vowels preceding coda /t, p / tokens for 40 speakers were analyzed using H1*–H2*, an acous-tic correlate of glottal constriction. Results indi-cate that coda glottalization is more common be-fore a sonorant, and this effect is still found phrase-finally, even when phrasal creak is taken into ac-count. Nonetheless, the process occurs in other en-vironments. While we conclude that coda glottaliza-tion may occur to enhance the voicelessness of coda /t / before sonorants [20, 28], we argue that this can-not fully explain the phenomenon