Word boundary marking at the glottal level in the production of German obstruents

Abstract

The present contribution attempts to provide another piece in the puzzle of approaching the word as a phonetic unit. The phonetic domain that will be investigated is speech production at the level of gestures. Based on the results of a transillumination study, we will evaluate patterns of the glottal opening gesture in the voiceless obstruents of German under the production of sequences with and without an intervening word boundary. After reviewing the literature about the potential of glottal opening gestures for the coding of word segmentation, this study will show that the facts provided here are better explained with an acoustic-based than a gesture-based interpretation of word segmentation.