Understanding anticipatory speech postures: does coarticulation extend outside the acoustic utterance?

Multiple studies strongly suggest that anticipatory coarticulation has a planned component. Speakers forced to begin an acoustic utterance before knowing all details of how it will unfold show reduced coarticulatory influences from those initially unknown speech segments. Therefore, anticipatory coarticulation as we currently understand it may reflect a more general process whereby speech acts that are currently planned, but whose acoustic consequences remain in the future, bias current articulator positions. This more general process could be in effect even before an utterance is acoustically active. The present talk will review the author’s recent work in anticipatory speech postures. Specifically, these findings suggest that speakers bias their lips to anticipate utterances yet to be acoustically initiated, in a way that tracks currently available information. In laboratory tasks, speakers primed with just the initial consonant or nuclear vowel of an upcoming monosyllabic utterance shape their lips to reflect this priming. Similarly, speakers in natural conversation produce anticipatory lip postures while awaiting their turn, but only when the intended utterance is quite short. The conceptual links between these findings and anticipatory coarticulation will be discussed.