An overview of the basic ideas of articulatory phonology is presented, along with selected examples of phonological patterning for which the approach seems to provide a particularly insightful account. In articulatory phonology, the basic units of phonological contrast are gestures, which are also abstract characterizations of articulatory events, each with an intrinsic time or duration. Utterances are modeled as organized patterns (constellations) of gestures, in which gestural units may overlap in time. The phonological structures defined in this way provide a set of articulatorily based natural classes. Moreover, the patterns of overlapping organization can be used to specify important aspects of the phonological structure of particular languages, and to account, in a coherent and general way, for a variety of different types of phonological variation. Such variation includes allophonic variation and fluent speech alternations, as well as ‘coarticulation’ and speech errors. Finally, it is suggested that the gestural approach clarifies our understanding of phonological development, by positing that prelinguistic units of action are harnessed into (gestural) phonological structures through differentiation and coordination.

A GESTURAL PHONOLOGYOver the past few years, we have been investigating a particular hypothesis about the nature of the basic 'atoms' out of which phonological structures are formed. The atoms are assumed to be primitive actions of the vocal tract articulators that we call 'gestures.' Informally, a gesture is identified with the .fo~mat~on. (and release) of a characteristic constrictlon WIthm one of the relatively independent articulatory subsystems of the vocal tract (i.e., oral, la~n~eal, velic). Within the oral subsystem, constrictIOns can be formed by the action of one of three relatively independent sets of articulators: the lips, the tongue tip/blade and the~on~e~ody: As actions, gestures have some mtrmsI.c t~me associated with them-they are characterizatlons of movements through space and over time (see Fowler et aI., 1980).Within the view we are developing, phonological structures are stable 'constellations' (or 'molecules', to avoid mixing metaphors) assembled out of these gestural atoms. In this paper, we examine some of the evidence for, and some of the consequences of, the assumption that gestures are the basic atoms of phonological structures. First, we attempt to establish that gestures are prelinguistic discrete units of action that are inherent in the maturation of a developing child and that therefore can be harnessed as elements of a phonological system in the course of development ( § 1.1). We then give a more detailed, formal characterization of gestures as phonological units within the context of a computational model ( § 1.2), and show that a number of phonological This paper has benefited from criticisms by Cathi Best, AliF aber, Elliot Saltzman, Michael Studdert-Kennedy, Enc Vatikiotis-Bateson, Doug Whalen and two anonymous reviewers. Our thanks to Mark Tiede for help with manuscript preparation, and Zefang Wang for help with the graphics. This work was supported by NSF grant BNS-8520709 and NIH grants HD-01994 and NS-13617 to Haskins Laboratories. 69 regularities can be captured by~epr~senting constellations of gestures (each haVIng mherent duration) using gestural scores ( § 1.3). Finally, we show how the proposed gestural structures relate to proposals offeature geometry ( § § 2 -3).

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In the past, the nature of the compositional units proposed for spoken language has largely diverged from the types of control units pursued in the domains of other skilled motor tasks. A classic source of evidence as to the units structuring speech has been patterns observed in speech errors -"slips of the tongue". The present study reports, for the first time, on kinematic data from tongue and lip movements during speech errors elicited in the laboratory using a repetition task. Our data are consistent with the hypothesis that speech production results from the assembly of dynamically defined action units -gestures -in a linguistically structured environment. The experimental results support both the presence of gestural units and the dynamical properties of these units and their coordination. This study of speech articulation shows that it is possible to develop a principled account of spoken language within a more general theory of action.