Repeating the movements involved in activities such as drawing or sports typically leads toimprovement in kinematic behavior: associated movements become faster, smoother, and lessvariable. While practice has also been shown to lead faster and smoother movement trajectoriesin speech articulation, little is known about its effect on articulatory variability. To address this,we investigate the extent to which the repetition and predictability of articulatory gestures affectvariability in the articulation of the frequent German word ‘sie’ [zi]. We find that articulatory variabilityis proportional to the duration of [zi] and speaking rate. By contrast, we find that articulatory variabilityis reduced with repetition during the experiment. In addition, variability becomes smaller when theconditional probability of [zi] increases. The maximum reduction of variability is located during theexecution of the vocalic target of [i]. These results indicate that speakers are capable of fine tuningeven highly practiced articulatory movements.

This report presents a corpus of articulations recorded with Schlieren photography, a recording technique to visualize aeroflow dynamics for two purposes. First, as a means to investigate aerodynamic processes during speech production without any obstruction of the lips. Second, to provide material for lecturers of phonetics to illustrates these aerodynamic processes. Speech production was recorded with 10 kHz sampling rate for statistical video analyses (available at the Bavarian Archive for Speech Signals). Downsampled videos (500 Hz) were uplodad to a youtube channel for illustrative purposes.