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The purpose of this paper is to investigate the distribution of alveolar obstruents in palatalization across word boundaries in American English, with a focus on sociolinguistic factors and individual preferences. Utilizing the Buckeye Corpus of Conversational Speech, eight sample word combinations were examined: that you, but you, did you, would you, unless you, this you, because you, and as you. Through audio file analysis and spectrogram examination, we determined the palatalization patterns of word-final alveolar obstruents, /t/, /d/, /s/, and /z/, across word boundaries. The results showed that /t/ is less likely to be palatalized, while /d/, /s/, and /z/ are more frequently palatalized before /j/. The study also revealed that gender significantly influences the palatalization of /d/, with women showing a greater tendency to palatalize than men, who often retain a non-palatalized /d/. For the other consonants, /t/, /s/, and /z/, both genders exhibited similar palatalization patterns, and age was found to have no significant impact on the palatalization of any alveolar obstruent. Logistic regression analysis further identified /t/ as a key predictor of a speaker’s overall palatalization tendency, suggesting that a high preference for palatalizing /t/ correlates with a higher likelihood of palatalizing other consonants as well.