04 Mar 2003

Jim Scobbie (QMUC)

An articulatory study of English /l/ sandhi and vocalisation I use Alan Wrench's MOCHA multispeaker articulatory speech database to explore /l/ in English. EPG analysis reveals that eight ramdomly selected speakers, drawn from three nations with distinct phonological systems (Scotland, England and USA) all display pervasive and systematic /l/ vocalisation (lack of alveolar contact). Vocalisation of word-final /l/ is very strongly context-dependent for seven subjects. These English speakers have a post-lexical external sandhi alternation of consonantal vs. vocalic /l/. Onset vs. coda syllabification of /l/ is not sufficient to condition the distribution of vocalisation, though prosodic factors are necessary, as well as segmental and phrasal ones. I will present the general tendencies and the systematic linguistic differences between the speakers, which are orthogonal to national dialect.

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