Glottal stops do not constrain lexical access as do oral stops.

Area of Science:

• Psycholinguistics
• Phonetics
• Linguistics

Background:

• The glottal stop in Maltese functions both as a phoneme and an epenthetic element in vowel-initial words.
• Understanding the processing of such phonetic variations is crucial for models of speech perception and lexical access.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate the processing characteristics of the Maltese glottal stop.
• To determine if its hyperarticulation reflects an underlying form during real-time processing.
• To examine the role of speaker-specific experience and acoustic mismatches in lexical access.

Main Methods:

• Three experiments were conducted using behavioral measures to assess listener responses.
• Experiment 1 examined hyperarticulation and underlying form mapping.
• Experiments 2 and 3 investigated lexical activation patterns and compared glottal stops with oral stops like /t/.

Main Results:

• Hyperarticulation of the glottal stop does not always map to an underlying form, though it may be interpreted as such later.
• Lexical access is bidirectional: vowel-initial words activate /ʔ/-initial words and vice versa.
• This pattern of activation is specific to glottal stops and not observed with oral stops like /t/.

Conclusions:

• Glottal stops possess a unique status in lexical processing, distinct from other stop consonants.
• Their processing appears to be prosodically licensed, influenced by the broader prosodic structure rather than purely acoustic features.