ISCA Archive Eurospeech 1993
ISCA Archive Eurospeech 1993

Resistance of bilabials /p, b/ to anticipatory labial and mandibular coarticulation from vowel types /i, a, u/

Rudolph Sock, Anders Löfqvist

The timing of lip and jaw movements and acoustic events was studied for one subject producing six Aku pseudo words, such as "papa" and "baba", at two speaking rates. Movement data from the upper and lower lips, and the jaw were obtained via an opto-electronic tracking device, together with a simultaneous audio recording. The acoustic duration of the medial bilabial closure, served as a temporal base for analyzing consonantal resistance to anticipatory vowel coarticulation. Within this temporal base, a phase was defined as the interval between peak raising or lowering velocity for an articulator and the acoustic onset of the following vowel. The proportion of time taken by each phase in the temporal base, provides a measure of anticipatory coarticulation of the vowel in the consonant. Results suggest that the rounded vowel /u/ has a higher coarticulatory influence on the labial consonant than the unrounded vowels /i, a/. Both voiced and the voiceless consonants have the same resistance to vowel coarticulation. Generally, all three articulators show structurally similar kinematic patterns.

Keywords: resistance, anticipatory coarticulation, phases, kinematic, acoustic, patterns