Incomplete neutralization of /t/ and /d/ in flapping environments: An analysis of the North Midland dialect of American English

Abstract

This paper presents an acoustic study of alveolar flaps in American English as produced by twenty speakers of a North Midland dialect spoken in the Kansas area. Vowel duration differences in monosyllabic and disyllabic tokens and consonant duration differences in monosyllabic tokens duplicated previous findings in that vowels preceding /d/ were significantly longer than those preceding /t/ and in that the average duration of /t/ was significantly longer than that of /d/. When analyzing flap frequency, it was discovered that females flapped more often than males and that participants were more likely to flap when they were less aware of the contrast between /t/ and /d/. Contrary to past research, neither word frequency nor morphological complexity affected flap frequency in the present study. Flap frequency was based on a method of distinguishing flapped from unflapped stops on a speaker-by-speaker basis, a more accurate method than that used in previous studies.