V-to-V Coarticulation Induced Acoustic and Articulatory Variability of Vowels: The Effect of Pitch-Accent

Abstract

In the present study we analyzed vowel variation induced by carryover V-to-V coarticulation under the effect of pitch-accent as a function of vowel quality (using a minimally constrained intervening consonant to maximize V-to-V effects). We tested if /i/ is more resistant to coarticulation than /u/, and if both vowels show increased coarticulatory resistance in pitchaccented syllables. Our approach was unprecedented in the sense that it involved the analysis of parallel acoustic (F2) and articulatory (x-axis dorsum position) data in a great number of speakers (9 speaker), and real words of Hungarian. To analyze the degree of coarticulation, we adopted the locus equation approach, and fitted linear models on vowel onset and midpoint data, and calculated the differences between coarticulated and non-coarticulated vowels in both domains. To measure variability, we calculated standard deviations of midpoint F2 values and dorsum positions. The results showed that accent clearly exerted an effect on the phonetic realization of vowels, but the effect we found was dependent on both the vowel quality, and the domain (articulation/acoustics) at hand. Observation of the patterns we found in parallel acoustic and articulatory data warrants for reconsideration of the term 'coarticulatory resistance', and how it should be conceptualized.