Word-final Coronal Stop Variation across Words : Cases of American and British English

It is well-documented that coronal stops in English are most likely to undergo lenition when appearing in a prosodically weak position. Based on the data in the two corpora, this paper analyzes the patterns of coronal stop realizations across words in American English (AE) and British English (or Received Pronunciation (RP)). Results showed that coronal stops over a word boundary were subject to flapping, glottaling, nasal plosion and deletion. Coronal stops in AE, specifically those in superlative and derivational suffixes, were commonly deleted. Most coronal stops in RP, however, stayed unchanged across words. In addition, coronal stops in AE tended heavily to undergo flapping between vowels, but those in RP did not. The underlying voicing contrast also played a significant role in the variation where voiceless coronal stops often underwent glottaling whereas voiced counterparts did not in both AE and RP. Also, word frequency had an influence on such alternations in the sense that low-frequency words resisted weakening in both dialects.