Cider apples and jeder Abend: the interplay of /r/-sandhi and word-initial glottalisation in English-accented German.

Short abstract: The aim of the present study is to investigate word-final /r/ and word-initial glottalisation in English-accented German and in English in relationship to phrasing and focus. This is the first study on the interplay between external sandhi and glottalisation in relationship to prosodic structure, comparing native and non-native language, carried out by means of ultrasound tongue-imaging. Some scholars argue that glottalisation can block external sandhi, however, a previous study of English /l/ found that glottalisation of vowel-initial words could co-occur with different amounts of sandhi (Scobbie and Pouplier 2010). The transfer of external sandhi in the interlanguage has been seldom investigated and with conflicting results (Zsiga 2011). We recorded native English speakers with German as L2 and German native speakers with simultaneous tongue-ultrasound and audio recordings. The following hypotheses were formulated: a) glottalisations can overlap with /r/-sandhi, and phrase boundaries, not glottalisations, block sandhi, b) /r/-sandhi is most frequent in phrase-medial position and before deaccented words, while glottalisations are most frequent at phrase boundaries and before accented words, and c) transfer of glottalisation and sandhi occurs from the native to the non-native language. Results will be reported and discussed in light of the models presented above. Full abstract: http://intro2psycholing.net/labphon15/long_abstracts/LabPhon15_Revised_abstract_227.pdf