Abstract

Sociophonetic literature investigating consonantal variation in American English has revealed that the production of voiced stop closures in the intersonorant position differs systematically by region. This indicates that sociocultural factors may influence the phonetic realization of voiced stops. The current study examines whether the implementation of closure voicing in running speech by older children is affected by regional variation. Acoustic measurements included stop closure duration and closure voicing duration (absolute and proportional) obtained from read sentences. The prosodic prominence of the target word was varied, introducing an additional source of variation. Our sample included 48 girls and 36 women, each representing one of three US dialect regions: Midland, North, or South. We analyzed a total of 3,524 tokens. As predicted, children produced stops with less consistency than adults. Children’s comparatively longer durations and greater variability—especially as a feature of lexical stress—are indicative of their more effortful productions and developing mastery of lexical stress contrastivity. Significant interactions between dialect and age group showed that children from the South dialect region deviated from their adult counterparts and implemented voicing akin to their peers from the Midland and North.