Pre-aspiration in Iceland Is Conditioned by Gender/Sex

This paper focuses on pre-aspiration, defined here as a period of (primarily) glottal friction found in sequences of vocalic and consonantal sonorants and phonetically voiceless obstruents. Previous pre-aspiration studies revealed sensitivity of the phenomenon to (bio)social factors. However, there is little work that actually focuses on sociophonetic effects on pre-aspiration. One of the most common findings in the sociophonetics of preaspiration is that female speakers are more likely to pre-aspirate more often and with longer durations. Our study asks whether pre-aspiration is conditioned by gender/sex in Icelandic, assumed to be one of the prototypical pre-aspirating languages. We analyse 20 speakers of Modern Icelandic participating in a picture naming task. Our results show that female speakers produce longer durations of local breathiness and voiceless preaspiration, as well as noisier tokens.