Eddington, E. & Elzinga, D. (2008). The phonetic context of American English flapping: Quantitative evidence. Language and Speech, 51(3), 245–266.
Presentation: Belinda
Summary: Thomas
The phonetic context of word-internal flapping is explored by considering stress placement, following phone, and syllabification. Results of two corpus studies exhibit two trends. First, flaps appear before unstressed syllables, while [tʰ] appears before syllables with primary or secondary stress. Second. flaps appear preceding [ə, ɪ, i, ɚ] and [1], while [tʰ] precedes [ɛ, eɪ, ɔ, aɪ, ɑ, æ,u]. In order to see how these generalizations are related to the way speakers determine pronunciation, two experiments were conducted. Results of Experiment 1, a nonce word pronunciation task, showed that stress is a prominent factor in deciding between [tʰ] and [ɾ]. The former is associated with stress that follows, while the latter occurs when a the preceding vowel is stressed. As for syllabification, a syllable-division task on quasi-phonemic transcription was done, and the results show that [tʰ] is generally placed at the syllable onset. On the other hand, [ɾ], following a lax vowel, tends to be in the coda. When the vowel is lax, [ɾ] has no effect on syllabification. In Experiment 3, a reading and syllabification task was conducted to further verify the findings from Experiment 2. The results successfully specified the environment where [tʰ] occurs (in the onset), but another experiment was needed to reveal the environment for [ɾ]. Finally, Experiment 4 showed that [ɾ] tended to occur when the preceding syllable is stressed, and the following syllable, which contains a lax vowel, is unstressed. To conclude, in addition to stress patterns, the vowel that follows /t/ is also a strong factor in determining between [tʰ] and [ɾ].
