On the Temporal Organization of Syllabic Processes

Abstract

With respect to temporal phenomena, human speech production exhibits many complex but lawful patterns. There can be little doubt that during the production of an utterance, the nervous system accomplishes its task with great precision and a high degree of automacity. An understanding of pronunciation and its temporal organization is an urgent goal both in the fundamental study of language and speech and in various applications. The purpose of this paper is to contribute towards assessing our present knowledge about temporal mechanisms in speech. Special attention will be devoted to the work of Chistovich and Kozhevnikov. These investigations suggest the interpretation of the classical notion of the syllable as a mechanism of articulatory programming upon which higher-level mechanisms of “rhythm generation” operate and within which temporal relations between successive gesture initiations are controlled. The present review discusses available evidence in terms of this conceptualization. Examples will be given of mechanisms of “intersyllabic” timing such as, for instance, synactic processes, syllabic structure, and segmental shape and mechanisms of “intrasyllabic” timing such as those underlying the synchronization of phonatory and articulatory events, articulatory coordination, and coarticulation and the acoustic duration of vowel and consonant segments.