Coarticulation across secondary articulations

Abstract

Consonants with secondary articulations, which involve simultaneous consonant and vowel‐like articulations, are found as contextual allophones in many languages and as independent phonemes in some languages. These consonants show special behavior with respect to vowel‐to‐vowel coarticulation, as determined from acoustic measurements. Phonemic secondary articulations in stops, fricatives, and liquids of Russian, Bulgarian, and Arabic generally block any vowel‐to‐vowel influence across the consonant. However, contextual secondary articulations in Russian, Bulgarian, Polish, and English generally propagate extreme effects of one vowel onto the other. Both of these differ from the usual coarticulation across consonants without secondary articulations. These results can be accounted for if we distinguish the representations of phonemic secondary articulations (as consonants with their own vowel features), from contextual secondary articulations (as consonants acquiring features from adjacent vowels), from lack of secondary articulation (as consonants with no vowel features). Given such a distribution of vowel features, phonetic interpolation can proceed straightforwardly between adjacent feature values.