Coordination of consonant and vowel articulations in Japanese

Abstract

By means of pellet‐tracking technique using an x‐ray microbeam system, observations of articulatory movements for a larget set of Japanese nonsense words containing various types of CV syllables, vowel sequences have been conducted. In particular, characteristics of mutual influences of the vowel and consonant articulations upon each other were investigated. It was observed that (1) in V1CV2 articulations, relative timing of consonant articulations and V1−V2 transitions varied depending on the type of consonant; and (2) for the vowel articulation in CVC, the degree of perturbation of tongue tip position for /t/, tongue body position for /k/, and jaw position for /p/ was approximately same, whereas the perturbation of lip position for /p/ was smaller than that of jaw position. Coordinations of the movements of the velum, tongue, and lip were also investigated with special reference to the difference in the syllable initial and syllable‐final nasal consonants in Japanese. Basic set of data on English is also being studied for comparing articulatory characteristics of English with those of Japanese.