Go' a Lo' of Glottal Stops?

Age, gender, and regional speech variation

David Eddington (Brigham Young University) and Caitlin Seegmiller Channer (University of New Mexico) study and write about glottal stops. Their article notes that in word-final, prevocalic position (e.g. it is) there are various possible phonetic realizations of /t/ in American English (e.g. regular [ t ], a flap [ D ] as in butter, or a glottal stop [ ' ] as in cat and dog). Their present study examines the linguistic and social factors associated with the use of the glottal stop in American English. Within this study 1,101 instances of word-final, pre-vocalic/t/ from the Santa Barbara Corpus were extracted. The glottal stop occurred in 24% of the cases. Logistic regression analysis was used to identify factors that favor glottaling of /t/. Findings from this study concur with the previous research in that age and region were significant: Westerners in their teens and 20s glottalized more than non-westerners in the same age groups. This contrasts with speakers who are 30 and older, both Westerners and Non- westerners, who glottalize to a much smaller degree. In addition to the previous findings, glottaling is favored by a following stressed syllable; however, gender and following vowel quality were not influencing variables, which contradicts the previous experimental findings. In conclusion, this study provides evidence that word-final /t/s are more often followed by word-initial consonants than vowels, which places them in a glottalizing context. Instances with a glottal realization are stored in the mental lexicon and are available as possible pronunciation choices even in prevocalic position.

American Speech, 2010, vol. 85.