Withgott Effect

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The Withgott Effect is a term in the study of Phonology relating to the pronunciation of stops in American English.

Speakers of American English pronounce the sound [t] in characteristic but complex ways. Many have noted that the words “latter” and “ladder” are nearly homophonous, and such examples once led linguists to characterize t-flapping, where [t] sounds like [d], as occurring between two vowels where the first vowel is stressed (accented). This would correctly rule out a flapped-t in, for instance, “Mathilda” but not “Matty.”

In a dissertation in 1982, M.M. Withgott demonstrated that speakers’ behavior is a good deal subtler in what has come to be known as the Withgott Effect. Notably, words seem to be chunked into pronunciation units she referred to as a foot, similar to a metrical unit in poetry. Such chunking was said to block flapping in the word ‘Mediterranean’ ([[Medi[terranean] ], cf. [ [sub[terranean]]). How a word is chunked relates to its morphological derivation, as seen by contrasting morphologically similar pairs such as:

Initial-type t vs. flapped-t

Mili tary vs. capital

Mili taristic vs. capita l istic

where the medial [t] in cápitalìstic can be flapped as easily as in post-stress cátty, in contrast to the medial [t] in mílitarìstic. Long, seemingly monomorphemic words also are chunked in English for purposes of pronunciation. In such words [t]’s---as well as the other unvoiced stops---are pronounced like initial segments whenever they receive secondary stress or are at the beginning of a foot:

Navra tilóva

Abra cadábra

Ala kazám

Rázz matàzz

But:

Fliberti gibety

Humu humu nuku nuku apu a‘a

[edit] Further reading

Withgott, M. Margaret. 1982. Segmental Evidence for Phonological Constituents. Ph.D.Disseratation for the University of Texas at Austin.

Iverson, Gregory K. and Sang-Cheol Ahn. 2004.English Voicing in Dimensional Theory. Language Sciences (Phonology of English).

Kahn, Daniel. 1976. Syllable-Based Generalizations in English Phonology. Ph.D. Dissertation for the University of Massachusetts reproduced by I.U. Linguistics Club.

Steriade, Donca. 1999. Paradigm uniformity and the phonetics-phonology boundary. In M. Broe and J. Pierrehumbert (eds.), Papers in Laboratory Phonology V: Acquisition and the lexicon, 313-334. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.