In American English, voiceless codas /t/ and /p/ are often glottalized: They have glottal constriction that results in creaky voice on the preceding vowel. Previous claims suggest that such glottalization can serve to enhance /t/ or, more generally, voicelessness of coda stops. In this study, we examine the timecourse of word recognition to test whether glottalization facilitates the perception of words ending in voiceless /t/ and /p/, which is expected if glottalization is in fact enhancing....

Speakers with vowel categories that are considered merged by traditional measures (e.g., F1 and F2 measurements at a single time point) may contrast vowel classes in dimensions beyond vowel quality, such as duration. Durational differences among vowel classes have been observed to persist even in cases of spectral overlap (e.g., Fridland et al., 2014; Labov & Baranowski, 2006), suggesting that duration may serve as a contrastive cue among spectrally-merged or near-merged vowel classes. Th...

Annotation systems for intonation contours are ideally based on a well-motivated phonological analysis of the language in question, such that instances of indecision are restricted to uncertainties over what intonational structure the speaker has used, rather than over the choice of label in situations where no suitably distinctive label is available or more than one suitable label is available. This contribution inventorizes a number of cases of overanalysis and underanalysis in MAE_ToBI and...

The challenge of prosodic annotation is reflected in commonly reported variability among trained annotators in the assignment of prosodic labels. The present study examines individual differences in the perception of prosody through the lens of prosodic annotation. First, Generalized Additive Mixed Models (GAMMs) reveal the non-linear pattern of some acoustic cues on the perception of prosodic features. Second, these same models reveal that while some of the untrained annotators are using the...