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Speaker: Dr. Lisa Davidson (NYU)

Time: Nov 19, Friday 9:30 - 10:30 am

Title: Glottalized segments & creaky prosody: how glottal elements are realized

Abstract: Glottalization can serve many functions in language, including as a consonant, a contrastive feature of vowels or sonorants, a prosodic marker or a sociolinguistic variable. This talk focuses on the consonantal and prosodic uses of glottalization, in particular the realization of glottal stops, and the interaction between glottal(ized) consonants and prosodic uses of creaky voice. In the first part of the talk, data from phonemic glottal stops in Hawaiian and from allophonic glottal stops in American English is analyzed to investigate how glottal stop implementation is affected by surrounding context. In the second part, acoustic cues distinguishing segmental from prosodic creak in American English are examined. Results indicate that glottal stops are rarely produced with a full closure, and that the extent of the period of glottalization depends on the adjacent sounds and word position in both Hawaiian and English. In English, acoustic differences in fundamental frequency, noise and spectral tilt measures distinguish segmental glottalization from prosodic creak. The versatility of glottalization within languages may be possible because both multiple acoustic cues and their timing can be manipulated in order to assist listeners in distinguishing the various uses.