Consonantal Variations at Conflicting Privileged Positions: Focusing on English Intervocalic Word-initial Coronal Stops

In the process of speaking a language, there is a universal phenomenon where an articulation of a consonant is subject to strengthening or weakening to facilitate the perception or production. In English, consonants are strengthened by means of aspiration or devoicing in prosodically-strong positions such as the beginning of a word or before a stressed vowel to enhance perception, while consonantal weakening such as glottaling or flapping are applied in prosodically-weak positions such as between syllables, at the end of a word, and between vowels to facilitate pronunciation. This study aims to elucidate the variation patterns of English stops in the prosodically-conflicting environment where strong word-initial stops appear between two weak vowels. Results show that 67% of the cases exhibit no variation, which is remarkably unusual considering that the alternation rate of the variations is mostly very high. The reason for this peculiarity lies in the compromise of variations in the environment where positional privileges are overlapped. Consequently, relatively strong voiceless stops show a higher lenition rate, while weak voiced counterparts exhibit a lower lenition rate, emphasizing the significance of the voicing factor in the phenomenon. Word frequency, gender and age factors, however, hardly exert an influence on such a consonantal variation.