An x-ray microbeam study of the effects of stress and position-in-syllable on consonant articulation

Abstract

This paper reports on an investigation of the effects of lexical stress and position-in-syllable on the kinematics of the primary articulators involved in the production of bilabial and alveolar consonants in American English. Data for the study were collected at the x-ray microbeam facility in Madison, Wisconsin, and consist of movement trajectories of pellets attached to the lips and tongue tip during the production of /p, b, t, and d/ in real words for two speakers of American English. Effects of stress and position-in-syllable on the relationship between peak velocity and displacement will be reported. Previous work (Ostry etal., 1983) has shown that stress significantly affects the relationship between peak velocity and displacement. Preliminary results of the present study suggest that position-in-syllable also affects this relationship. The prosodic status of intervocalic stops preceding unstressed vowels (labeled as ambisyllabic by Kahn, 1976 and syllable-final by Selkirk, 1982) will also be investigated by comparing their kinematic characteristics to those of unambiguously syllable-initial and syllable-final stops.