Modulation of the following segment effect on English coronal stop deletion by syntactic boundaries

Abstract

Variable deletion of word-final coronal stops in English is strongly conditioned by whether the following segment is a consonant or a vowel. This paper uses corpus data to show that this following segment effect is weaker across strong syntactic boundaries (such as between independent matrix clauses) than across weak syntactic boundaries (between a verb and its direct object). This result is argued to be compatible with the Production Planning Hypothesis: that following context effects on phonological variation can be bled by failure to encode the next word in time for it to influence an alternation. Further, the interaction of boundary and following segment is asymmetric; the deletion-inhibiting effect of a following vowel is significantly weakened across stronger syntactic boundaries, while the deletion rate before consonants is more stable across different boundary types. The asymmetry provides new evidence in favor of syllabification-based explanations for why coronal stop deletion exhibits the following segment effect.