Withgott Effect

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"

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. [http://www.uwm.edu/~iverson/engvce.pdf "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.