The present study investigates the role of articulatory and perceptual factors in the change from pre-to post-aspiration in two varieties of Andalusian Spanish. In an acoustic study, the influence of stop type, speaker age, and variety on the production of pre-and post-aspiration was analyzed in isolated words produced by 24 speakers of a Western and 24 of an Eastern variety, both divided into two age groups. The results confirmed previous findings of a sound change from pre-to post-aspiration in both varieties. Velar stops showed the longest, bilabials the shortest, and dental stops intermediate pre-and post-aspiration durations. The observed universal VOTpattern was not found for younger Western Andalusian speakers who showed a particularly long VOT in /st/-sequences. A perception experiment with the same subjects as listeners showed that post-aspiration was used as a cue for distinguishing the minimal pair /pata/-/pasta/ by almost all listeners. Production-perception comparisons suggested a relationship between production and perception: subjects who produced long post-aspiration were also more sensitive to this cue. In sum, the results suggest that the sound change has first been actuated in the dental context, possibly due to a higher perceptual prominence of post-aspiration in this context, and that post-aspirated stops in Andalusian Spanish are on their way to being phonologized.

There is an increasing consensus to regard gesture and speech as parts of an integrated communication system, in part because of the findings related to their temporal coordination at different levels. In general, results for different types of gestures show that the most prominent part of the gesture (the apex) is typically aligned with accented syllables [6, 10-12, 14, 17]. The aim of the present study is to test for this coordination by focusing on head movements taken from a semi-spontaneous setting in order to look at the effects of upcoming phrase boundaries on their timing. Our results show that while apexes of head gestures are synchronized with accented syllables, upcoming phrase boundaries have an effect on the timing of three gestural points, namely the start, apex, and end time of head gestures. Crucially, these points are aligned differently with respect to the stressed syllable for trochees as compared with iambs/monosyllables, showing that head nods are retracted before upcoming phrase boundaries. This result corroborates previous results by Esteve-Gibert & Prieto [17] for pointing gestures in laboratory settings.

The main aim of the present study was to investigate incremental coda compensatory shortening in the production and perception of German monosyllables including factors such as accentuation (i.e., accented vs deaccented) and codas’ manner of articulation (i.e., sonorant vs obstruent). Ten speakers produced real German words like /klɪŋ/ and /klɪŋt/. We measured the duration of the vowel and the first coda consonant (C1). Overall there was no significant vowel shortening effect. However, some speakers did show vowel shortening and even more so in accented tokens with sonorant codas. Additionally, all speakers tended to shorten C1. In a subsequent experiment, we tested whether listeners compensate for different degrees of vowel and C1 shortening. 21 subjects judged which vowel in selected pairs such as /klɪŋ/—/klɪŋt/ was longer. In two thirds of all pairs, listeners perceived vowels before simplex codas as longer—even in pairs with equal segment durations. While this overall bias indicates perceptual vowel shortening before complex codas, listeners nevertheless show tendencies to compensate for non-shortened vowels before complex sonorant codas, i.e., they were perceived as longer. Although there was less vowel shortening in production, listeners showed perceptual vowel shortening and some tendencies toward compensation in contexts that favor shortening.