Spatiotemporal coordination in word-medial stop-lateral and s-stop clusters of American English

Abstract

This paper is concerned with the relation between syllabic organization and intersegmental spatiotemporal coordination using Electromagnetic Articulometry recordings from seven speakers of American English (henceforth, English). Whereas previous work on English has focused on word-initial clusters (preceding a vowel whose identity was not systematically varied), the present work examined word-medial clusters /pl, kl, sp, sk/ in the context of three different vowel heights (high, mid, low). Our results provide evidence for a global organization for the segments involved in these cluster-vowel combinations. This is reflected in a number of ways: compression of the prevocalic consonant and reduction of CV timing in the word-medial cluster case compared to its singleton paired word in both stop-lateral and s-stop clusters, early vowel initiation (as permitted by the clusters’ phonetic properties), and presence of compensatory relations between phonetic properties of different segments or intersegmental transitions within each cluster. In other words, we find that the global organization presiding over the segments partaking in these word-medial tautosyllabic CCVs is pleiotropic, that is, simultaneously expressed in multiple phonetic exponents rather than via a privileged metric such as c-center stability or any other such given single measure employed in previous works.

Limits on gestural reorganization following vowel deletion: The case of Tokyo Japanese

“…The development of research methods which have allowed us to directly observe articulatory movement with high temporal resolution has made this a tractable problem. Recent work by Shaw and colleagues has demonstrated, through a number of case studies, that coordination relations between gestures can be revealed by studying the structure of temporal variation in articulatory kinematic data (e.g., Gafos et al, 2014;Shaw, 2022;Shaw & Gafos, 2015;Shaw & Kawahara, 2018b;; see also Durvasula et al, 2021;Lialiou et al, 2021;Sotiropoulou & Gafos, 2022). A topic that is nevertheless still under-explored is how consonant clusters created via vowel deletion are coordinated, a gap that the current paper attempts to address.…”

“…There may be several relevant considerations for predicting which clusters are more likely reorganize than others (cf. Gafos et al, 2020;Lialiou et al, 2021). Since, in the case at hand, we are dealing with consonants that cross a syllable boundary, e.g., [ϕ.so] vs.[ϕ.ta] syllable contact constraints are one consideration (Gouskova, 2004;Murray & Vennemann, 1983;Vennemann, 1988).…”