Abstract

Previous studies have shown that New Zealand English (NZE) medial /t/ can be realised as a canonical stop, with varying degrees of aspiration, a flap, a fully-voiced variant, a glottal stop and a fricative. The patterning of medial /t/ is highly socially conditioned: it has been shown that the use of medial /t/ variants in NZE varies according to speaker age, gender and occupation (Bell, 1977; Holmes, 1994,1995; Bayard, 1999; Taylor, 1996). This study aims at replicating the results of those auditory-only analyses while combining acoustic and auditory analyses for the first time. The study also aims at uncovering new variants using the acoustic method. The key findings are the following: 1) The data confirm the claim by Taylor (1996)that the prestige medial /t/ variant is a fricative. The results further show that the fricative has entered NZE through the speech of females, and has strongly established itself in the dialect; 2) Conversely, analyses of T-voicing confirms the claim by Holmes (1994) that it has entered NZE through the vernacular style of working-class male speakers and has increasingly established itself in middle class speech; 3) A large amount of pre-aspiration for both stop and fricative realisations of /t/ in medial position. This is interesting because pre-aspiration is said to be rare diachronically and synchronically across languages, given its lack of phonetic salience (Silverman 2003

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