The effect of speaking rate on lingual behavior for a transconsonantal vocalic gesture: An x-ray microbeam study

Abstract

The purpose of the present study was to further explore the relationship between speaking rate and articulatory movements. A good deal of evidence suggests that speaking rate variation is accompanied by changes in the extent of overlap for successive articulatory gestures, however, previous work has shown that a simple model of gestural sliding is inadequate to explain changes in acoustic measures across speaking rates [Weismer et al. (in submission)]. Therefore, a more descriptive study of movement may be one step toward developing an acoustic model of changes in articulatory processes across speaking rate. Exploration of lingual movement across speaking rate was carried out using data from the x-ray microbeam data base. Ten speakers produced multiple tokens of the sentence ‘‘The other one is too big’’ at different speaking rates. Plots of the changing tongue contour through the VCV sequence /ubI/ from ‘‘too big’’ were examined to determine if the pattern of tongue movement was similar across speaking rates but with more or less overlap, or if the behaviors looked qualitatively different. Preliminary results show at least two different variations in lingual movement underlying changes in speaking rate. [Work supported by DC00820 and DC00319.]