Christine Ericsdotter, Björn Lindblom and Johan Stark

Proceedings of the XIVth International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (1999): 1885 - 1888
(San Francisco, USA)  

ABSTRACT

Articulatory data obtained from X-ray films were analyzed to investigate articulatory coordination in Swedish vowels and dental and retroflex stops. Several quantitative frameworks for predicting observed tongue contours were evaluated. Performance was assessed on a set of articulations traced at the V1:C boundary in V1:CV2 sequences. The best model, as determined by an rms-criterion, had 3 parameters: length of blade (dental/retroflex), degree of coarticulation, pharynx width. According to this account the coarticulatory (vowel-dependent) variations in [d] and [] tongue contours are seen as arising from the overlap of a gradual deactivation of the V1: gesture and the movement towards a vowel-independent consonant target, a process successfully captured by interpolation in the model. This result is discussed in terms of co-production (Öhman, [1]) and the overlapping innervation wave theory (Joos [2]).

View pdf-version of paper