Links between production and perception of glottalisation in individual Australian English speaker/listeners

Glottalisation of coda stops is a recent change in Australian English. Previous studies have shown that speakers use glottalisation to signal coda stop voicelessness in production, and that listeners interpret glottalisation as cueing coda stop voicelessness in perception. As is to be expected for a recent change, younger speakers glottalise more than older speakers, but in perception both age groups appear to use glottalisation similarly. This study examines whether links between the production and perception of glottalisation exist at the level of the individual. We determined how frequently individuals used glottalisation in production, and analysed this against how heavily the same individuals weighted glottalisation in perception. Although differences have previously been found at the age group level, at the level of the individual we found no correlation between how heavily listeners weighted glottalisation in perception and how frequently they used glottalisation in production for either the younger or the older listeners. Nevertheless, we did find a small number of individuals who exhibited an alignment of their production and perception repertoires, which may suggest that only a small proportion of individuals exhibit a strong production- perception link, and we propose that these individuals may be important for driving the progression of change.