A Phase Window Framework for Articulatory Timing

Abstract

One of the most significant challenges in the study of speech production is to acquire a theoretical understanding of how speakers coordinate articulatory movements. A variety of work has demonstrated that articulatory, prosodic and extralinguistic factors all influence speech timing in a complex and interactive way. Models such as Articulatory Phonology that stipulate the relative timing of articulatory units must be revised to allow for this variability. Such a revision is outlined below.The following work should be viewed as a presentation of a new framework for conceptualising articulatory timing. This approach, meant to be programmatic rather than conclusive, is productive if it motivates research that might not otherwise have been undertaken. §1 overviews Articulatory Phonology. The implementation of articulatory timing in terms of phasing relations is discussed. Speech production data bearing on timing variability are discussed in §2. §3 argues for an alternative to Articulatory Phonology's current rule-based approach to intergestural timing that can allow for linguistic and extralinguistic variables to systematically influence phasing relations. §3.2 introduces the PHASE WINDOW framework, which allows the degree of articulatory overlap between linguistic gestures to vary within a constrained range. Finally, §4 concerns the relation of intergestural timing to the postulation of the segment as a primitive unit in phonology. It is hypothesised that certain intergestural timing relations are stable and lexically specified. Gestures whose coordination is constrained by lexical PHASE WINDOWS seem to bear a close relation to those conglomerates of gestures that constitute what is traditionally considered to be a segment.