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Article published In:
English World-Wide
Vol. 42:2 (2021) ► pp.200–226

Even Americans pre-aspirate

| Aarhus University
| Adam Mickiewicz University
| Aarhus University

This paper focuses on a phenomenon known as pre-aspiration, defined as a period of glottal friction found in the sequences of sonorants and phonetically voiceless obstruents, as in hit [hɪht], hat [hæht], hiss [hɪhs], and cash [kæhʃ]. Pre-aspiration has been reported in North American English (Clayards and Knowles 2015); however, there are no systematic studies of pre-aspiration in this part of the English-speaking world. Our study therefore considers the following main questions. 1. Is pre-aspiration present in American English and how frequent is it? 2. Does it vary by region? We also map variation related to speaking task, sex, and a range of language-internal factors. Our analyses of data from the Nationwide Speech Project Corpus (Clopper and Pisoni 2006) confirm that pre-aspiration is a feature of American English, with rates of application reaching between 0–20 percent, depending on the region and the task. Furthermore, the more formal the task, the higher the rate of pre-aspiration application.

Keywords: pre-aspiration, American English accents, phonetics, corpus phonology, variation
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
    • 1.1Pre-aspiration as an areal phenomenon
    • 1.2Comparability of studies of pre-aspiration in English dialects
    • 1.3Cross-linguistic constraints on pre-aspiration
  • 2.Materials and methods
    • 2.1Pre-aspiration
    • 2.2Data processing
    • 2.3Materials
      • 2.3.1Sociolinguistic interview data
      • 2.3.2Read speech data
      • 2.3.3Word list data
    • 2.4Problematic contexts
    • 2.5Speakers
    • 2.6Annotation
  • 3.Results
  • 4.Discussion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • Sources
  • References
Available under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at [email protected].

Published online: 26 April 2021
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/eww.00065.hej
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