2024/02/26 by Joshua Penney, Felicity Cox, Andy Gibson · 1 citation
Arts and Humanities · Psychology · Social Sciences · #Linguistic Variation and Morphology #Phonetics and Phonology Research #Syntax, Semantics, Linguistic Variation
paper · pdf · doi:10.1515/phon-2023-0029
openalex publication_date 2024/02/26 · crossref created 2024/02/26 · crossref issued 2024/02/27 · crossref published 2024/02/27 · crossref published-online 2024/02/27 · crossref deposited 2024/04/09 · crossref published-print 2024/04/25 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · crossref indexed 2026/07/24 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/25
Vowel hiatus is typically resolved in Australian English through complementary strategies of liaison (j-gliding/w-gliding/linking-r) and glottalisation. Previous work suggests a change in progress towards increased use of glottalisation as an optimal hiatus-breaker, which creates syntagmatic contrast between adjacent vowels, particularly when the right-edge vowel is strong (i.e. at the foot boundary). Liaison continues to be used when right-edge vowels are weak, but glottalisation as a hiatus resolution strategy in general appears to be increasing and may be more common in speakers from non-English speaking backgrounds raising the question of whether exposure to linguistic diversity could be driving the change. We examine hiatus resolution in speakers from neighbourhoods that vary according to levels of language diversity. We elicited gliding and linking-r hiatus contexts to determine how prosodic strength of flanking vowels and speakers' exposure to linguistic diversity affect hiatus resolution. Results confirm that glottalisation occurs most frequently with strong right-edge vowels, and gliding/linking-r are more likely with weak right-edge vowels. However, strategies differ between gliding and linking-r contexts, suggesting differing implementation mechanisms. In addition, speakers from ethnolinguistically diverse areas produce increased glottalisation in all contexts supporting the idea that change to the hiatus resolution system may be driven by language contact.