An electropalatographic and acoustic study of temporal coarticulation for Catalan dark/l/ and German clear/l/.
Electropalatographic and F2 frequency data in /VlV/ sequences reveal more prominent C-to-V effects for Catalan dark /l/ than for German clear /l/, more so in the /i/ context than in the /a/ context, which is in agreement with the existence of high lingual requirements on the formation of two constriction places for dark /l/. German clear /l/ exerts a similar amount of F2 displacement on both vowels which may be indicative of the tongue dorsum being directed towards a target position; this is also suggested by dorsopalatal contact and formant frequency data showing less vowel-dependent variability than clear /l/ in other languages though more so than Catalan dark /l/. Salient anticipatory requirements for the implementation of /l/ in the two languages block V1-dependent carryover effects to a large extent which results in more prominent vocalic anticipation than vocalic carryover. This directionality trend in vocalic coarticulation is more obvious for Catalan dark /l/ than for German clear /l/ (in agreement with the former consonantal variety requiring more anticipation than the latter) and opposes German /l/ to clear /l/ in other languages (i.e., the less constrained /l/ variety of Spanish may favor vocalic carryover over vocalic anticipation in VCV sequences).
Institut d'Estudis Catalans, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Spain. drecasens@iec.es
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Recasens
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Pallarès
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Fontdevila
D006801:Humans; D007802:Language; D008297:Male; D010700:Phonetics; D013060:Speech / Q000502:physiology*; D013061:Speech Acoustics; D013068:Speech Production Measurement; D013997:Time Factors