Effects of phonotactic legality on gestural coordination in consonant clusters: An electromagnetic articulography study

Abstract

Cross-language studies of speech production have shown that English speakers can produce phonotactically illegal onset fricative-nasal clusters (e.g., /fn/) with high accuracy based on acoustic analyses. However, it remains unclear whether the articulatory gestures affiliated with the fricative-nasal segments are produced with comparable gestural timing to native onset clusters (e.g., /sm/, /fl/). We here used electromagnetic articulography (EMA) to investigate whether the production of non-native /fn/ onset clusters exhibits a comparable amount of consonant-vowel gestural overlap to native onset clusters (i.e., /sm/ and /fl/) in nonwords. Previous articulatory investigations have demonstrated that native English onset clusters exhibit an increase in gestural overlap between the vowel-adjacent consonant and the vowel (e.g., SMAGDEEP) when compared to the corresponding singleton (MAGDEEP). We controlled for the vocal tract configuration (e.g., jaw position) by comparing each onset cluster to heterosyllabic sequences consisting of the same consonant sequences (e.g., /sm/ vs /s#m/). While the data collection is still ongoing, the preliminary results (n = 3) suggest that when the complexity of the onset increased, vowel-adjacent consonantal gestures showed greater temporal overlap with vocalic gestures for phonotactically legal sequences (SMAGDEEP versus MAGDEEP) but not illegal sequences (FNAGDEEP versus NAGDEEP).