Stress effects on coarticulation in English and Greek

Abstract

The effects of stress on production variability and V-to-V coarticulation were compared in American English and Greek, two languages which differ in vowel inventory size and in the magnitude of V-to-V coarticulation (Okalidou and Koenig, 1999). Six speakers, one male and two females from each language, were recorded producing nonsense VCV utterances in a carrier phrase, with randomly alternating stress. The Greek stimuli included all five vowels of the language; the English stimuli included the closest counterparts of the Greek vowels. The medial plosive consonants alternated between the bilabial and alveolar place of articulation, yielding different degrees of coarticulatory resistance (Recasens, 1985, 1989). Plosives were chosen to have similar VOT values across languages in order to minimize duration effects. A comparison of stressed versus unstressed vowel areas reveals significant differences across languages. Specific vowel effects and language effects are also noted with respect to changes in production variability under the stressed versus unstressed conditions. The magnitude of V-to-V influences as a function of stress and position is discussed in terms of the above crosslinguistic comparison in order to obtain further insight on the coarticulatory behavior of languages which differ in the size of vowel inventory (Manuel and Krakow, 1984).