Acoustic analysis of like in North-West England shows context effects, but not function effects

Abstract

If supposedly homophonous words were acoustically distinct despite sharing phonemic form, theories of mental storage may have to account for the consistent differences with
separate storage for each homophone. Previous studies of the homophonous functions or word classes of the English word like showed such sub-phonemic differences
between functions, though some studies also found effects of utterance context alongside these. Schleef & Turton (2018) argued that all these function effects reduce to
context effects, since function is not independent of context – for example, quotative like typically occurs before a pause and thus is typically subject to lengthening because
of its position, not due to a lexicalised acoustic distinction between functions. Testing this argument with new data from a different regional variety to those used by Schleef &
Turton, we only find differences that can be explained by context, in line with their argument. This casts prior findings of acoustic distinctions between like functions in
new light, and introduces the need for further research (especially including the frequency of different functions).