ISCA Archive Interspeech 2015
ISCA Archive Interspeech 2015

Voice-conditioned allophones of MOUTH and PRICE in bahamian creole

Janina Kraus

Allophonic height alternations in MOUTH and PRICE, conditioned by coda voicing, have been confirmed for a wide variety of English accents, especially in the North American context. Realisations may vary in degree but not in direction. Moreton and Thomas [1] suggest that universal processes may underly the varying productions and propose the Asymmetric Assimilation model to unify observations on the effect of voicing. So far, the hypothesis has not been tested on creolised varieties of English. This study aims to describe the spectral nature of voice-conditioned allophones of MOUTH and PRICE in two social varieties of Bahamian Creole. The results of an acoustic analysis of 15 creole speakers from Nassau, Bahamas, support the claim that automatic phonetic processes may underly the initial direction of the allophony, which is then available for sociolinguistic differentiation.