The glottal stop is frequently used in Finnish but it is usually not considered a phoneme. It participates in sound rules like other phonemes and has prosodic uses in turn-holding and signaling...Show moreThe glottal stop is frequently used in Finnish but it is usually not considered a phoneme. It participates in sound rules like other phonemes and has prosodic uses in turn-holding and signaling syllable boundaries. Studies on Maltese have suggested the glottal stop can occur both as a phoneme and as a prosodic effect (Mitterer et al., 2021). The present study had 28 participants listen and rate the comprehensibility and fluency of utterances with a glottal stop or a glottal stop unpronounced in an online experiment. The participants rated the items without a glottal stop significantly lower than the items with a glottal stop. The ratings were significantly affected by the likelihood that specific suffixes occur with a glottal stop. The findings suggest that a glottal stop between two separate words is a phoneme that only occurs with certain suffixes. The results concerning compound words were inconclusive and the effect of identical vowels around the glottal stop should be further investigated.Show less