Adventures in /Ɂ/

The glottal stop is a speech sound with varying functions. It can occur as a phoneme in its own right, as a marker of prosodic boundaries, as a replacement of oral stops, and as the replacement for lexical pitch accents. These unusual properties often provide possibilities for deriving predictions that differentiate conflicting theoretical accounts at the core of Laboratory Phonology. Here, I review work based on this premise, with a focus on the effects of glottal stops on lexical access in Maltese and German. The counterintuitive conclusion is that the glottal stop is surprisingly similar to a full phoneme in German (where most assume it is not a phoneme) but a surprisingly “weak” phoneme (in terms of lexical access) in Maltese, where it is a phoneme. This suggests that the glottal stop always is a weak phoneme and the threshold to consider it a phoneme in a language should be low.