Let's not forget attrition

Abstract

The heated debate about the ending of bursaries for nursing students has given scant attention to one important issue: drop-out rates.

English l-sandhi involves an allophonic alternationin alveolar contact for word-final /l/ in connectedspeech [4]. EPG data for five Scottish StandardEnglish and five Southern Standard British Englishspeakers shows that there is individual anddialectal variation in contact patterns. We analysedvocalisation rate (% of tokens with no alveolarcontact) and the area of any residual alveolarcontact. Word-final /l/ contact is, to some extent,onset-like before vowel-initial words and coda-likebefore words with a labial onset C. If the vowelhas a glottal attack, however, or the onset C is /h/,sandhi is less predictable, suggesting thatresyllabification is insufficient as a mechanism forconditioning tongue tip behaviour of word final /l/.