Temporal coordination of articulatory gestures in consonant clusters and sequences of consonants (original) (raw)

Intrinsic and prosodic effects on articulatory coordination in initial consonant clusters

2009

Abstract EMA was used to study the coordination of the articulatory gestures for C1 and C2 in onset clusters, firstly as a function of the segmental make-up of the clusters, and secondly as a function of stress and prosodic boundary conditions. The segmental results, which compared German and French, indicated a much lower degree of overlap of C1 and C2 for C2=/n/compared to C2=/l/(with C1=/p, b, k, g/). Overlap was also less for voiceless compared to voiced C1 for German.

Articulatory movement in non-native consonant clusters

2015

We investigated articulatory movements of native Japanese speakers’ productions of non-native consonant clusters, using the WAVE system (NDI Corp.). Four Japanese male speakers pronounced “blat”, “bnat”, “btat”, and “pnat” 10 times each in a carrier sentence. Tongue tip displacement from the first to the second consonant varied greatly among the speakers. An ANOVA with two factors, Speaker and Cluster, was performed, and showed significant main effects of both Speakers (p<0.0001) and Clusters (p<0.0001), and significant interaction (p<0.0001). In addition, comparison with previous data of English speakers indicated that the tongue tip displacement in Japanese speakers was larger than that for English speakers. We suggest that the large displacement from the first to second consonant for Japanese speakers indicates that coarticulation is more difficult for them than it is for English speakers.

Phrase boundary effects on the temporal kinematics of sequential tongue tip consonants

The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 2008

This study evaluates the effects of phrase boundaries on the intra- and intergestural kinematic characteristics of blended gestures, i.e., overlapping gestures produced with a single articulator. The sequences examined are the juncture geminate [d(#)d], the sequence [d(#)z], and, for comparison, the singleton tongue tip gesture in [d(#)b]. This allows the investigation of the process of gestural aggregation [Munhall, K. G., and Löfqvist, A. (1992). “Gestural aggregation in speech: laryngeal gestures,” J. Phonetics 20, 93–110] and the manner in which it is affected by prosodic structure. Juncture geminates are predicted to be affected by prosodic boundaries in the same way as other gestures; that is, they should display prosodic lengthening and lesser overlap across a boundary. Articulatory prosodic lengthening is also investigated using a signal alignment method of the functional data analysis framework [Ramsay, J. O., and Silverman, B. W. (2005). Functional Data Analysis, 2nd ed. (...

Crosslinguistic cineradiographic studies of the temporal coordination of speech gestures

Working Papers 40, 251-263, Dept. of Linguistics, University of Lund, Sweden, 1993

The research programme outlined here is devoted to the analysis of speech gestures from 7 X-ray motion films of speech from 5 different languages (Southern Swedish, British English, West Greenlandic Eskimo, Cairo Arabic and Bulgarian). The issues specifically addressed are (i) the methodology and feasibility of analysing and identifying individual gestures in these languages and assigning them to their respective phonemes, (ii) the organization of movement in these languages, (iii) an evaluation of the observed patterns of temporal coordination in these languages in the light of coarticulation models, (iv) the relation of coarticulation to assimilation, especially the assimilation of vowels to uvular and pharyngeal consonants in Eskimo, vowels to emphatic consonants in Arabic and palatovelar consonants to palatal vowels in Swedish.

Strength and Structure: Coupling Tones with Oral Constriction Gestures

Interspeech 2019, 2019

According to the segmental anchor hypothesis within the Autosegmental-Metrical approach, tones are aligned with segmental boundaries of consonant and vowels in the acoustic domain. In prenuclear rising pitch accents (LH*), the rise is assumed to occur in the vicinity of the accented syllable it is phonologically associated with. However, there are differences in the alignment patterns within and across languages that cannot be captured within the AM approach. In the present study, we investigate the coordination of tonal and oral constriction gestures within Articulatory Phonology. Therefore, we model the coordination of prenuclear LH* pitch accents in Catalan, Northern and Southern German with respect to syllable production on the basis of recordings with a 2D electromagnetic articulography. We provide an extended coupled oscillators model that allows for balanced and imbalanced coupling strengths. Based on examples, we show that the observed differences in alignment patterns for prenuclear rising pitch accents can be modelled with the same underlying coordinative structures/coupling modes for vocalic and tonal gestures and that surface differences arise from gradient variation in coupling strengths. Index Terms: dynamical systems, tonal alignment, tonal gestures, oral constriction gestures, computational model of variability, imbalanced coupling 1.2. Coordination of tonal and oral gestures in AP Articulatory Phonology [9, 10] decomposes speech into a set of potentially overlapping units, articulatory gestures. The temporal organisation of gestures can be modelled by a

Are gesture and prosodic prominences always coordinated? Evidence from perception and production

This study explores the phonological coordination between gesture and speech by addressing two main questions: (1) Do speakers perceive the misalignment between gesture prominence and prosodic prominence? (2) Does this perception depend on the semantic information conveyed by gesture and speech modalities in production? Two experiments were carried out. Experiment 1 tested the speakers' sensitivity of stimuli in which the pointing gesture prominence coincided or not with the stressed syllable in trochees and iambs. Results revealed that unsynchronized combinations were less acceptable than synchronized combinations, but that unsynchronized trochees (with the gesture apex at the posttonic syllable) were frequently accepted, while unsynchronized iambs (with the apex at the pre-tonic syllable) were rejected. Experiment 2 tested how speakers synchronize gestures with speech in a pointing task. Results revealed that when gesture is complementary to speech the gesture prominence frequently occurs after the speech prominence and is uttered as two different speech acts. We conclude that the semantic coordination of gesture and speech needs to be taken into account when studying the temporal coordination of both modalities.

Gestural Coordination in Tashlhiyt Syllables

2011

In this study we investigated the coordination of consonantal and vocalic gestures in Tashlhiyt Berber as a function of their subsyllabic constituency. The aim was to determine whether the syllabification proposed of word initial clusters is reflected in the coordination of articulatory gestures. Two main results were obtained: (1) The timing of consonants in word initial clusters in relation to a gestural target in the syllable coda provided evidence for non-branching onsets only. (2) This was true both for target words containing a vocoid and for those with a non-vocoid nucleus.

Articulatory coordination and the syllabification of word initial consonant clusters in Italian

2012

In this study we investigate the articulatory coordination of word initial consonant clusters in Italian. We show that these clusters are generally coordinated in a similar way to clusters in languages with complex syllable onsets, in that the timing of the rightmost consonantal gesture in relation to the vocalic gesture is adjusted according to the number of consonants in the cluster.