Electropalatographic and acoustic data were collected from two Italian and two English subjects engaged in spontaneous conversation. A subset of the dental/alveolar consonants were examined and found to show consistently less closure than their equivalents in citation-form speech in both languages. Environments for relative lack of closure differed from language to language. A wide range of degrees of closure were found, indicating that conversational realisations are best described using a continuum rather than discrete categories. We suggest that this can be accomplished using a gestural approach.