Coarticulation in Italian /VtV/ Sequences: A Palatographic Study

Abstract

Patterns of linguopalatal contact during the production of intervocalic /t/ in different vowel contexts were examined by means of electropalatography, in order to assess the degree of dependency between tongue tip/blade and tongue body, the relative strength of anticipatory and carryover effects and their temporal extent. Results show that the coupling between tip and body of the tongue is rather loose: constraints imposed on tongue body by consonant production are described qualitatively and quantitatively. Carryover effects are stronger and more systematic than anticipatory effects: both can extend across the consonant. Results also indicate that coarticulatory effects depend on the identity of the vowel held constant and, to a lesser extent, on stress position. Some hypotheses are presented concerning articulatory goals and strategies in /VtV/ productions.

New developments in electropalatography: A state-of-the-art report

“…Hardcastle and Clark, 1981;Hoole, Ziegler, Hartmann and Hardcastle, 1989) and of coarticulatory phenomena (e.g . Such an approach has been adopted in various investigations of fricatives (e.g.…”

“…Experimental phonetic research has included investigations into: articulatory characteristics of fricative production Hardcastle and Clark, I98 1;Hoole, Ziegler, Hartmann and Hardcastle, 1989); coarticulation of VCV sequences in English (Butcher, 1989), in German (Butcher and Weiher, 1976) in Japanese (Miyawaki, Kiritani, Tatsumi and Fujimura, 1974), in Catalan and in Italian (Farnetani, Vagges and Magno-Caldognetto, 1985); the 'instability' of word final alveolar stops in English and German (Kohler, 1976;Kohler and Hardcastle, 1974); articulatory dynamics of egressive and implosive stops in Shona (Hardcastle and Brasington, 1978); palatalization in Estonian (Eek, 1973); symmetry of of 'lateral is/'). Most of the problems associated with the technique in the early stages of development, such as unwanted capacitance effects between closely bunched wires, saliva1 bridging of adjacent electrodes, and mechanical difficulties in the manufacture of suitable acrylic plates, have now largely been overcome and the technique has emerged as a useful tool for investigating tongue dynamics in both normal and abnormal speech, in a variety of different languages.…”

Articulatory characteristics of Hungarian ‘transparent’ vowels

“…Although long-distance coarticulation across schwa was found in English (Magen, 1997), studies also show that [iː] is resistant to coarticulation from the preceding vowel (s) in terms of perception (e.g. Recasens, 1987 for Spanish andCatalan, Farnetani, Vagges, &Magno-Caldognetto, 1985 for Italian, Magen, 1984 for Japanese). Thus, the acoustic and perceptual stability of high front vowels does not fully explain the behavior of these vowels in vowel harmony.…”

Visual display of tongue‐palate contact: Electropalatography in the assessment and remediation of speech disorders

“…The wide applicability of the technique and its usefulness as a tool in phonetic descriptive work is reflected in the range of phenomena that have been researched in recent years. Areas include: the articulatory characterisation of lingual fricative production (Wolf, Fletcher, McCutcheon & Hasegawa, 1976; Hardcastle & Clark, 1981; Hoole, Ziegler, Hartmann & Hardcastle, 1989); aspects of co-articulation in a variety of languages including English (Hardcastle & Roach, 1977;Butcher, 1989;Wright & Kerswill, 1989), German (Butcher & Weiher, 1.976), Japanese (Miyawaki, Kiritani, Tatsumi & Fujimura, 1974), Catalan (Recasens, 1984a(Recasens, ,b, 1989, French (Marchal, 1988) and Italian (Farnetani, Vagges & Magno-Caldonetto, 1985;Farnetani, 1990); the 'instability' of word-final alveolar stops in English and German (Kohler & Hardcastle, 1974;Kohler, 1976); articulatory dynamics of egressive and implosive stops in Shona (Hardcastle & Brasington, 1978); dental and alveolar stops in Kimvita Swahili (Hayward, Omar & Goesche, 1989); palatalisation and palatal consonants in Estonian (Eek, 1973), Catalan (Recasens, 1984c) and Japanese (Matsuno, 1989); symmetry of lingual gestures in English (Hamlet, Bunnell & Struntz, 1986), in Japanese (Hiki & Imaizumi, 1974), in French (Marchal & Espesser, 1989) and in Italian (Farnetani, 1988); 'emphatic' consonants in Sudanese colloquial Arabic (Ahmed, 1984); 'force of articulation' in French (Marchal, Courville & Belanger, 1980); 'vocalised' /1/ in English ; articulatory correlates of voicing (Palmer, 1973;Farnetani, 1989); and general lingual articulatory dynamics (Recasens, 1989).…”