Perception of Indexical Features in Children’s Speech 335drawn from the PVC project). As expected for a stereotype variable, the laryn-
gealized forms decrease in more formal styles, being instead replaced by the
standard plain variants. For older females in particular the style shift is abso-
lute; that is, local laryngealized variants are not used at all in formal speech
styles. Thus, notwithstanding style, age, and class effects, we can observe that
plain variants are statistically much more likely to occur in female speech.
In word-¿ nal pre-pausal context a different set of variants is found. Here
laryngealized or glottal forms are very rare. Instead, plain [p t k] are the
default forms for most speakers (a pattern which, incidentally, differentiates
Tyneside from most other British accents, where glottal stops are usually fre-
quent in this context). For young women, though, pre-aspirated [ހp ހt ހk] are
emerging as a favored form. Our analysis of word-list data showed that 70% of
tokens produced by young women were pre-aspirated (Docherty and Foulkes
1999). Pre-aspiration was considerably less frequent for younger males (35%).
The overall rate of pre-aspiration was also much lower for older speakers in
Figure 14.1 Variant usage for word-medial (p,t,k) by sex and speaking style, Tyne-
side adults (N tokens: conversation = 1,764 for females, 1,628 for males;
word-list = 571 for females, 572 for males).