Why Do Glottal Stops and Low Vowels Like Each Other?

The aim of the present study is two-fold. First, we will show that glottal stops/glottalization and low vowels are likely to co-occur in typologically different languages. Second, we will investigate the question whether this widely attested cooccurrence of glottalization and low vowels could be due to a perceptual phenomenon; i.e. differences in the perception of vowel quality of glottalized as compared to non-glottalized vowels. We hypothesized that vowels are perceived lower in their height if they are glottalized. In order to test our hypothesis we conducted a perceptual experiment with two German continua of b[i]tenb[e]ten (‘to offer’, ‘to pray’), a non-glottalized and a glottalized one. 23 German subjects took part in an identification test in which they were asked to indicate whether they perceived words from these continua as b[i]ten or b[e]ten. The data show very clearly that subjects perceive b[e]ten more often than b[i]ten if the vowel is glottalized. This result indicates that the co-occurrence of glottal sounds and low vowels in the languages of the world could actually originate in a reinterpretation of glottalized higher vowels as lower ones.