An articulatory study of consonant-vowel overlap

Fowler [Phonetica (1981); J. Exp. Psychol. (1983)] has proposed that speech production is a series of global articulatory movements associated with the vowels of an utterance, upon which smaller, consonantal movements are superimposed. A possible articulatory test of this theory models consonants and vowels as alternations between a relatively closed and open vocal tract. Using the Wisconsin x-ray microbeam system, articulatory records were obtained of English phrases with varied accent placement and alveolar consonant sequences of varied duration. Analysis of one speaker's productions is now complete. When the data are pooled over all conditions, the total duration of the bisyllabic sequence and the time difference between sonority peaks is strongly related to the length of the medial consonants; there is no evidence for articulatory overlap—i.e., vowel shortening in the neighborhood of long consonants or shifting of sonority peaks toward longer consonants. However, correlations within accent types uncover a strong shortening effect for accented syllables preceding long consonants, along with a reduced displacement in the following vowel. Thus any comprehensive overlapping consonant-vowel theory of speech production must take into account the general prosodic structure of the utterance. [Work supported by the National Science Foundation under grant No. IRI-8617852 to Mary Beckman.]