RESEARCH ARTICLE Stochastic Time Models of Syllable Structure

Drawing on phonology research within the generative linguistics tradition, stochastic meth-ods, and notions from complex systems, we develop a modelling paradigm linking phono-logical structure, expressed in terms of syllables, to speech movement data acquired with 3D electromagnetic articulography and X-ray microbeammethods. The essential variable in the models is syllable structure. When mapped to discrete coordination topologies, syl-labic organization imposes systematic patterns of variability on the temporal dynamics of speech articulation. We simulated these dynamics under different syllabic parses and eval-uated simulations against experimental data from Arabic and English, two languages claimed to parse similar strings of segments into different syllabic structures. Model simula-tions replicated several key experimental results, including the fallibility of past phonetic heuristics for syllable structure, and exposed the range of conditions under which such heu-ristics remain valid. More importantly, the modelling approach consistently diagnosed sylla-ble structure proving resilient to multiple sources of variability in experimental data including measurement variability, speaker variability, and contextual variability. Prospects for exten-sions of our modelling paradigm to acoustic data are also discussed