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The Korean Association for the Study of English Language and Linguistics
[ Article ]
Korea Journal of English Language and Linguistics - Vol. 22, No. 0, pp.1133-1158
ISSN: 1598-1398 (Print) 2586-7474 (Online)
Print publication date 31 Jan 2022
Received 25 Aug 2022 Revised 20 Oct 2022 Accepted 30 Oct 2022
DOI: https://doi.org/10.15738/kjell.22..202210.1133

A Mismatch in Completeness between Acoustic and Perceptual Neutralization in English Flapping

Gwanhi Yun
Professor, Department of English Language and Literature, Daegu University 201 Daegudae-ro, Gyeongsan Gyeongbuk, 38453, Korea, Tel: 053) 850-6025 ghyun@daegu.ac.kr


© 2022 KASELL All rights reserved
This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons License, which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract

This study attempts to reveal the acoustical characteristics of flapped /t/s and /d/s as well as phonetic correlates of word-final /t,d/ contrast and to examine whether English native listeners distinguish a flapped /t/ and /d/ by using the durations of pre-flap vowels. For these purposes, production and perception experiments were administered for English native speakers. First, we found that word final devoicing does not occur in /t,d/ contrast and significant differences lie in many acoustic correlates, including durations of preceding vowels, stop closure durations, voicing duration and F0 of the preceding vowels. Second, the result showed the evidence that English flapping is incomplete neutralization, exhibiting that many acoustic properties differ between /t/ flaps and /d/ flaps in duration of pre-flap vowels, flap duration, voicing duration and VOT. Furthermore, the perception task yielded high perceptibility of word final /t,d/ contrast due to the availability of many acoustic cues. Next, it was shown that English listeners have difficulty in deciding whether a flap is an underlying /t/ or /d/. This suggests that complete neutralization engenders imperceptibility of /t/ flaps and /d/ flaps. Finally, our identification test revealed that the manipulation of the duration of the pre-flap vowels does not function as a perceptual cue for word medial /t/-/d/ contrast embedded in a flapping environment.

Keywords:

flapping, word final devoicing, (in)complete neutralization, acoustic correlates of voicing, (im)perceptiblity, length of pre-flap vowels

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