Movement organization in speech production : implications from studies of coarticulation

This thesis was concerned with coarticulatory patterns across various speech articulators and whether these can be accounted for by similar movement organization principles. Movements of the tongue dorsum, and the upper and lower pharynx, were recorded separately by a computerized ultrasound system during the production of vowel-consonant-vowel sequences. The movement amplitude, duration, and onset (relative to specific acoustic events) were computed for each articulator for a variety of speech gestures. It was shown that both spatial and temporal aspects of the movements varied in a similar manner for the three articulators as a function of the phonological context. The results indicate that spatiotemporal articulatory adjustments for vowels co-occur with the articulation of a consonant. This pattern can be accounted for by the notions of co-production and the 'spatial proximity' hypothesis