An electromagnetic articulography study of stop-/s/ and /s/-stop clusters in Greek

Abstract

Previous kinematic studies on consonant clusters suggest that many factors affect their articulatory timing, including speech rate, frequency of occurrence, and prosody. Other possible factors include the direction of articulatory movement (front-to-back, back-to-front), whether independent articulators (e.g., tongue and lips) or single articulators (e.g., tongue tip and tongue body) are involved, as well as the relative sonority of the consonantal segments. In this study, five talkers of Modern Greek produced the clusters /sp/, /ps/, /sk/, and /ks/ in the carrier phrase “Ipa_______pali” (I said________again). These clusters varied in articulatory direction, articulatory independence, and sonority patterns. We used four methods to determine the degree of articulatory overlap. Each method yielded durations (ms) between gestural landmarks, which were used to compute consonant overlap. The methods differed in the ways gestures were interpreted from the velocity signal (e.g., using extrema or 20% threshold) and how consonant overlap was computed. Preliminary results indicate that articulatory direction and relative sonority exerted the strongest effects on speakers’ productions, while articulator dependence/independence played no apparent role.