Phrase boundary effects on the temporal kinematics of sequential tongue tip consonants.
This study evaluates the effects of phrase boundaries on the intra- and intergestural kinematic characteristics of blended gestures, i.e., overlapping gestures produced with a single articulator. The sequences examined are the juncture geminate [d(#)d], the sequence [d(#)z], and, for comparison, the singleton tongue tip gesture in [d(#)b]. This allows the investigation of the process of gestural aggregation [Munhall, K. G., and Lofqvist, A. (1992). "Gestural aggregation in speech: laryngeal gestures," J. Phonetics 20, 93-110] and the manner in which it is affected by prosodic structure. Juncture geminates are predicted to be affected by prosodic boundaries in the same way as other gestures; that is, they should display prosodic lengthening and lesser overlap across a boundary. Articulatory prosodic lengthening is also investigated using a signal alignment method of the functional data analysis framework [Ramsay, J. O., and Silverman, B. W. (2005). Functional Data Analysis, 2nd ed. (Springer-Verlag, New York)]. This provides the ability to examine a time warping function that characterizes relative timing difference (i.e., lagging or advancing) of a test signal with respect to a given reference, thus offering a way of illuminating local nonlinear deformations at work in prosodic lengthening. These findings are discussed in light of the pi-gesture framework of Byrd and Saltzman [(2003) "The elastic phrase: Modeling the dynamics of boundary-adjacent lengthening," J. Phonetics 31, 149-180].
Department of Linguistics, University of Southern California, 3601 Watt Way, GFS 301, Los Angeles, California 90089-1693, USA. dbyrd@usc.edu
Dani
D
Byrd
Sungbok
S
Lee
Rebeka
R
Campos-Astorkiza
D001696:Biomechanical Phenomena; D005868:Gestures; D006801:Humans; D007802:Language; D009043:Motor Activity; D009068:Movement; D010699:Phonation; D013060:Speech / Q000502:physiology*; D013062:Speech Articulation Tests; D013068:Speech Production Measurement; D014059:Tongue / Q000502:physiology*