Lexical Effects on English Vowel Laryngealization

It is known that lexical statistics can influence coarticulation. For example, more confusable words (i.e. those with a low frequency relative to their phonological neighbors) have been shown to exhibit more nasal and vowel-to-vowel coarticulation than less confusable words in English and French. In this paper, we give evidence that another type of coarticulation, laryngealized phonation on vowels preceding coda-stops in English, behaves similarly. Words with lower relative frequencies show more laryngealization on measures of non-modal phonation than words with higher relative frequencies.

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