The prolonged VOT (i.e. aspiration) of voiceless stops in English has been
proposed by Kiparsky (1979), Withgott (1982), and Jensen (2000) to be
linked to the left edge of (recursive) prosodic feet, condensing the
disparate environments of aspiration in English (e.g. onset of word-initial
and stressed syllables) into a single description based on prosodic
structure. We show the results of a production study of voiceless stops in
all different possible environments, which finds that the level of
aspiration in the onset of the second syllable in lapse environments
(e.g. (lolla)([p]a(looza)),
(A(meri))[k]a)) is similar, and falls between that of stronger aspirated
environments and that of non-aspiration environments. A subsequent categorical
perception study finds that both environments behave as an unaspirated
environment does, while a gradient perception study finds the result
predicted by the prosodically-based theory: the word-medial lapse
environment behaves as other aspirated ones do, while the word-final lapse
environment behaves as non-aspirated ones do.