Vowel-initial glottalization as a prominence cue in speech perception and online processing

Abstract

Three experiments examined the relevance of vowel-initial glottalization in the perception of vowel contrasts in American English, in light of the claimed prominence-marking function of glottalization in word-initial vowels. Experiment 1 showed that the presence of a preceding glottal stop leads listeners to re-calibrate their perception of a vowel contrast in line with the prominence-driven modulation of vowel formants. Experiment 2 manipulated cues to glottalization along a continuum and found that subtler cues generate the same effect, with bigger perceptual shifts as glottalization cues increase in strength. Experiment 3 examined the timecourse of this effect in a visual world eyetracking task, finding a rapid influence of glottalization which is simultaneous with the influence of formant cues in online processing. Results are discussed in terms of the importance of phonetically detailed prominence marking in speech perception, and implications for models of processing which consider segmental and prosodic information jointly.