Effects of Regional Dialect on Word-Final Consonant Voicing

Two cues that signal phonological voicing in word-final obstruents in English are the amount of glottal pulsing during the consonant and the ratio of the duration of the vowel to the duration of the consonant. Purnell et al. (2012) examined the realization of the voicing contrast in word-final obstruents in two varieties of Wisconsin English and found that both of these cues differed across the two varieties. Smiljanic and Bradlow (2008) found that the temporal cue did not vary between clear speech and plain lab speech, but did not examine spontaneous speech. This study builds on these findings and examines the roles that temporal and non-temporal cues play in signalling the phonological voicing feature of word-final obstruents as a function of regional dialect (Experiment 1), speaking style (read speech vs. spontaneous speech) (Experiment 2), and manner (stop vs. fricative) (Experiment 3). The results suggest that the phonological contrast is maintained phonetically by both cues across dialects, speaking styles, and manners. However, spontaneous speech appears to produce a reduction in the contrast for the temporal cue compared to the contrast maintained in read speech. In addition, the Southern talkers make a smaller distinction between the phonological types than Northern and Western talkers. Therefore it seems that there is regional dialect variation across regional dialects and that more research is warranted into how this variation manifests across voicing cues.No embargoAcademic Major: Linguistic