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. Sixty American English listeners participated in an eye-tracking study, where they heard resynthesized glottalized and non-glottalized versions of CVC English words ending in /p, t, b, d/ while looking at a display with two words presented orthographically. Target words were presented with a minimal pair differing in place of articulation (e.g., cop-cot), or voicing, (e.g., bat-bad, cap-cab). Although there is little evidence that glottalization facilitates recognition of words ending in /t/ or /p/, there is a strong inhibitory effect: Words ending in voiced stops are recognized more slowly and poorly when the preceding vowel was glottalized. These findings lend little support to a listener-driven, enhancement-based explanation for the occurrence of coda glottalization in American English. On the other hand, they suggest that glottalized instances of coda /t/ and /p/, but not of coda /d/ and /b/, are perceived as equally good variants of these sounds.

Singaporean English (SgE) is spoken in Singapore, a nation of roughly 4 million people in Southeast Asia. Recent research has sought to identify the systematic features that make it distinct from other varieties of English. This is true of prosody as well. While the intonation of SgE has been described previously within a phonetic framework (Deterding 1994;Lim 2004), no phonological model has yet been proposed. This paper proposes a model of intonational phonology for SgE within the Autosegmental-Metrical framework. Three speakers were recorded reading declarative and question sentences of varying length. Preliminary results suggest that SgE has three prosodic units above the word: the Accentual Phrase (AP), Intermediate Phrase (ip) and Intonational Phrase (IP). An AP is slightly larger than a word and is defined by a L* pitch accent on a stressed syllable and a High boundary tone (Ha) on the AP-final syllable. In monosyllabic APs we see a rising contour, suggesting that both the L* and Ha targets are met on the same syllable. The initial AP shows a larger pitch range, and subsequent APs within the same ip show a compressed pitch range and iterative downstep. Tones of larger prosodic units will also be discussed.

This paper reports on a speech production experiment that explores whether the accentual phrase (AP) represents an abstract level of prosodic phrasing in Singapore English. Specifically, it tests whether the right edge of the AP is associated with phrase-final lengthening, the degree of which can be distinguished from lengthening associated with the intonational phrase (IP). Target words were produced in matched sentence contexts in 3 phrasal positions: AP-medial (wordfinal), AP-final, and IP-final. As predicted, target words in AP-final position were longer than those in AP-medial position and shorter than those in IP-final position. Analysis of target duration and f0 together shows that AP boundaries are well discriminated from medial positions. Together, these results strongly support an AP level of phrasing for Singapore English and highlight its role in predicting timing variability.

Singaporean English (SgE) is spoken in Singapore, a nation of roughly 4 million people in Southeast Asia. Recent research has sought to identify the systematic features that make it distinct from other varieties of English. This is true of prosody as well. While the intonation of SgE has been described previously within a phonetic framework (Deterding 1994; Lim 2004), no phonological model has yet been proposed. This paper proposes a model of intonational phonology for SgE within the Autosegmental-Metrical framework. Three speakers were recorded reading declarative and question sentences of varying length. Preliminary results suggest that SgE has three prosodic units above the word: the Accentual Phrase (AP), Intermediate Phrase (ip) and Intonational Phrase (IP). An AP is slightly larger than a word and is defined by a L* pitch accent on a stressed syllable and a High boundary tone (Ha) on the AP-final syllable. In monosyllabic APs we see a rising contour, suggesting that both the L* and Ha targets are met on the same syllable. The initial AP shows a larger pitch range, and subsequent APs within the same ip show a compressed pitch range and iterative downstep. Tones of larger prosodic units will also be discussed.