ABSTRACT
Stop consonants are ubiquitous among the world’s languages. These consonants are demarcated by three articulatory phases that can be targeted by sociophonetic factors: closing, hold, and release phases. In this overview, we discuss the primary acoustic and articulatory markers of each phase along with a review of studies investigating the sociophonetic factors implicated in each phase. Further discussion is focused on sociophonetic factors involved in the well-studied acoustic correlate of the stop laryngeal gesture, voice onset time (VOT), as well as phonological alternations involving stops. We conclude with a case study on the six stops in Derby English, [ph th kh b d ɡ], and investigate the sociophonetic influences of sex and age on acoustic correlates of the laryngeal status and place of articulation. Specifically, we investigate variation in VOT (a temporal correlate to laryngeal status) and center of gravity (a spectral correlate to place) in a corpus-based analysis.
