Conditioning factors in external sandhi : an EPG study of English /l/ vocalisation.

English l-sandhi involves an allophonic alternation in alveolar contact for word-final /l/ in connected speech [4]. EPG data for five Scottish Standard English and five Southern Standard British English speakers shows that there is individual and dialectal variation in contact patterns. We analysed vocalisation rate (% of tokens with no alveolar contact) and the area of any residual alveolar contact. Word-final /l/ contact is, to some extent, onset-like before vowel-initial words and coda-like before words with a labial onset C. If the vowel has a glottal attack, however, or the onset C is /h/, sandhi is less predictable, suggesting that resyllabification is insufficient as a mechanism for conditioning tongue tip behaviour of word final /l/.casl[1] Browman, C. & Goldstein, L. 1995. Gestural syllable position effects in American English, Producing Speech: Contemporary Issues, F. Bell-Berti & L.J. Raphael, eds. AIP Press: Woodbury, NY. 19-33. [2] Giles, S.B. & Moll, K.L., 1975. Cinefluorographic study of selected allophones of English /l/. Phonetica, 31, 206- 227. [3] Hardcastle, W. & Barry, W., 1989. Articulatory and perceptual factors in /l/ vocalisations in English. Journal of the IPA, 15, 3-17. [4] Scobbie, J. & Wrench, A., 2003. An articulatory investigation of word-final /l/ and /l/-sandhi in three dialects of English. Proc. XVth ICPhS, 1871-1874. [5] Sproat, R. & Fujimura, O., 1993. Allophonic variation in English /l/ and its implications for phonetic implementation. JPhon, 21, 291-311. [6] Wrench, A., 2000. A multi-channel/multi-speaker articulatory database for continuous speech recognition research. Phonus, 5, 1-13.pub44pu