Limits of audience design: Epenthetic glottal stops in Maltese

Many languages tend to mark vowel-initial words with a glottal stop in connected speech, especially when the word is in a prominent position (Garellek, 2014). This also happens in Maltese, even though the glottal stop here also occurs as a phoneme, so that the epenthetic glottal stop may significantly alter which other words the vowel-initial word is similar to. For the pair attur /ɑtːur/ versus qattus /ʔɑtːus/ (Engl. ‘actor’ vs. ‘cat), adding an epenthetic glottal stop to the vowel-initial renders the two words more similar. This provides an interesting test bed for the hypothesis of audience design. If speakers want to highlight the contrast between the two words, they should, in contrast to what usually happens when a word is prominent, not produce an epenthetic glottal stop. We tested this is in a production experiment and found that speakers instead produce much more glottal stops for such vowel-initial words under a phonological contrast compared with an unaccented version, and even slightly more than when under a lexical contrast (e.g., actor vs. theatre). Our results provide an example of a limitation of audience design.