Speech Task and Prosodic Context Influence Glottal Stop Variation in Tahitian

Abstract

It is well accepted that phonemic /ʔ/ can have multiple variants ranging from a canonical voiceless stop with full glottal occlusion to more vowel-like non-modal voiced variants. This study examines acoustic correlates of glottal stop variation in Tahitian. While it has a number of glottal variants like closely related Hawaiian, it differs significantly in that the major allophone in Tahitian is a fully or partially occluded glottal stop. While like Hawaiian more vowel-like variants are realised in less-constrained discourse, more voiceless variants and lower levels of Harmonics-to-Noise ratio are observed in word initialversus word medial contexts.