Coarticulation resistance in English /l/

Abstract

Allophonic variations in the quality and voicelessness of RP /l/ were investigated, largely through their acoustic correlates as revealed by spectrography. The conventional separation of two distributionally-conditioned extrinsic allophones “clear” and “dark” was in general confirmed, although under different right-boundary conditions clear [l] was more widely used, itself varying in degree of clarity, than has been suggested elsewhere. Additionally, and more significantly, in each context /1/ varied further under coarticulatory influence—in its quality attributable to an adjacent vowel, in quality (in terms of overall clarity/darkness) attributable to an adjacent second lateral, and in voicelessness attributable to an adjacent voiceless consonant. Both right-to-left and left-to-right coarticulation effects were observed extensively: surprisingly, both types seemed constrained by a CV -type articulatory syllable. One general principle emerged which better explained the pattern of coarticulatory variation in the data: coarticulation resistance, a property which it is proposed to associate with phonetic specifications for speech segments in the form of values whose magnitude varies, increasing in the case of RP [ł], [ł] and [l] in that order. The validity of this principle for these and perhaps for other published data is independent of the direction (R-L or L-R) of the coarticulatory effect, and of the feature (vowel-quality, lateral-quality or voicelessness) being coarticulated.