Temporal coordination of articulatory gestures in consonant clusters and sequences of consonants

In the framework of Articulatory Phonology, linguistic structures are represented in terms of coordinated articulatory gestures that are organized into a gestural score. Syllable structure can be seen as residing in the phasing of the dynamical gestures. The present study investigates the temporal coordination and cohesion of some articulatory gestures as a function of their respective configuration. It looks at the effect of speaking rate and accent on the articulation of the /kl/ or /skl/ clusters and on the same sequence of consonants separated by a reduced vowel (/k♠l/). Articulatory-phonetic representations inspired by gestural scores were recovered independently for both the acoustic and EPG signals that were recorded for two native American English speakers. Constriction locations and degrees were inferred from the EPG data by dividing the palates into place-of-articulation regions and tabulating the percent of electrodes contacted within these regions. These measurements support a Gestural Phonology account of the difference in the production and cohesion of /kl/ and /skl/ vs. /k♠l/. In a parallel modeling study, temporal events were recovered from the acoustic signal using a temporal decomposition procedure. These events and their relative timing are compared to the EPG-based gestures and their arrangement in the gestural score