Glottal Stops and Glottalization in German

Abstract This paper presents the results of an auditory and instrumental investigation into glottal stops and glottalization as boundary markers in German colloquial read speech of a North German non-dialect variety. It also reports on the occurrence of glottal stops and glottalization, outside the domain of word and morpheme boundaries, as reduction phenomena of supraglottal stop articulations. Finally, these sound features are discussed as elements in an articulatory phonology of connected speech in German, providing insights into the general theory of human speech production.