On the relation between overlap and release.

Abstract

This study is about the relation between gestural overlap and acoustic release. The aim is to define a set of different temporal relations from which the presence/absence of release in between two consecutive gestures can be predicted. The overlap of two consecutive gestures is here defined as the co-occurrence in time of their articulatory closure intervals. In this study, however, what is measured is the acoustic closure duration of stop consonants. In this context, an acoustic index of overlap—closure duration ratio—and release percent in every binary combination of the voiceless stop consonants—p, t, k— have been measured at word and sentence boundary and at two different vowel contexts, /a/ and /e/. Stop release does not have a phonologically contrastive function, yet languages systematically differ from one another in whether stops are released or not at specific contexts. Resulting from this fact, the argument in this study is that release is a result of specific temporal relations between two consecutive gestures, and these relations are part of the phonological representation.