Now you see it, now you don't: On the role of phonological contrast in coarticulation

Abstract

It is generally recognized that coarticulation is part of a learned, language- as well as speaker-specific behavior. Thereby it has long been suspected that language-specific aspects of coarticulation interact with the phonological system of a language. For instance, in a much cited study by Manuel (1990), she argued that the density of a language's vowel inventory is a determinant of the degree of vowel-to-vowel coarticulation; a similar argument was made much earlier by Öhman (1966) about the consonant inventory. Pinning down whether and how observed language-specific effects in coarticulation are directly related to phonological structure has, however, been difficult, and results have, across studies, been actually quite mixed (among others, Beddor et al. 2002). Indeed, Noiray et al. (2011) advanced the argument that there actually is no language-specific coarticulatory behavior, since in their study on anticipatory lip rounding in English and French individual variability exceeded any group-level effect between languages. In this talk, I report results from an ongoing study in which we aim to extend our knowledge on the possible relationship between contrast and coarticulation. We focus on the anticipatory spreading of two articulatory features (nasality, lip rounding) for three languages (French, American English, German) which allows us to permute the presence/absence of contrast. For nasality anticipatory spreading is extensive in American English while comparatively constrained in both, French and German. For lip rounding American English and German are very similar in showing a vast temporal extent of anticipation (French data are still being processed). Speaker-specific behavior does not seem to generalize across the articulatory features: speakers who coarticulate comparatively extensively in nasality do not necessarily do so for lip rounding and vice versa. While our study thus confirms once more that languages may differ in the temporal extent of anticipatory coarticulation, our results also resonate with other studies which have cast doubt on phonological contrast being a good predictor of these differences (Scarborough et al. 2015).

Beddor, P. S., Harnsberger, J. D., & Lindemann, S. (2002). Language-specific patterns of vowel-to-vowel coarticulation: Acoustic structures and their perceptual correlates. Journal of Phonetics, 30, 591-627.

Manuel, S. (1990). The role of contrast in limiting vowel-to-vowel coarticulation in different languages. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 88(3), 1286-1298.

Noiray, A., Cathiard, M.-A., Ménard, L., & Abry, C. (2011). Test of the movement expansion model: Anticipatory vowel lip protrusion and constriction in French and English speakers. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 129(1), 340-349.

Öhman, S. E. (1966). Coarticulation in VCV utterances: Spectrographic measurements. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 39(1), 151-168.Scarborough, R., Zellou, G., Mirzayan, A., & Rood, D. S. (2015). Phonetic and phonological patterns of nasality in Lakota vowels. Journal of the International Phonetic Association, 45(3), 289-309.

About Marianne Pouplier

Dr. Marianne Pouplier is a professor at the University of München, Institute for Phonetics and Speech Processing. She has won several prestigious awards, including the DFG Emmy Noether Award and the ERC Starting Grant. Her work has focused primarily on speech production, articulatory timing, speech errors, and phonetic universals. She has worked and published with many esteemed international researchers in numerous prestigious publications, including the Journal of Phonetics, JASA, JSLHR, and Phonology.