Glottal Stop Consonant in the Continuum of Glottis State

The present study was an investigation of glottal stop phonetic variants in different positions of the words in Tehrani verbal variety of Persian. Acoustic evidences indicate that the articulation of different variants of the consonant including glottal closure, creaky voice and vowel compensatory lengthening followed by its deletion or weakening, in their occurrence contexts in initial, middle and final position of the words, is in accordance with the laryngeal phonation continuum. Vocal folds in larynx get different states while pulmonic airstream passes through them. This, in turn, results in changes in glottis openness. With gradual changes in the degree of glottis openness, from a completely close to a mid-open and then to a totally open state, the phonetic manifestations of complete closure (voicelessness state), creaky voice, modal voice and possibly, breathy voice are appeared. The present study revealed that every one of the above-mentioned glottis figures corresponds to one of the allophones of glottal stop consonant.