Hostname: page-component-8448b6f56d-dnltx Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-04-25T00:14:45.946Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Articulatory coordination distinguishes complex segments from segment sequences

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 December 2021

Abstract

Phonological patterning motivates a distinction between complex segments and segment sequences, although it has also been suggested that there might be reliable phonetic differences. We develop the hypothesis that, in addition to their distinct phonological patterning, complex segments differ from segment sequences in how constituent articulatory gestures are coordinated in time. Through computational simulation, we illustrate predictions that follow from hypothesised coordination differences, showing as well how coordination is conceptually independent of temporal duration. We test predictions with kinematic data collected using electromagnetic articulography. Electromagnetic articulography data comparing labial-palatal gestures in Russian, which we argue on the basis of phonological facts to constitute complex segments, and similar labial-palatal gestures in English, which we argue constitute segment sequences, show distinct patterns of coordination, providing robust support for our main hypothesis. At least in this case, gestural coordination conditions patterns of kinematic variation that clearly distinguish complex segments from segment sequences.

Type
Articles
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

We would like to thank the participants who volunteered for this study. For assistance with data collection, we thank Christopher Geissler, Vivian Li and Muye Zhang. For comments and discussion, we thank audiences at AMP 2020, where aspects of this work were presented, as well as the Yale Phonology group (especially Samuel Andersson, Christopher Geissler, Mark Tiede, Natalie Weber and Doug Whalen) and the MSU Phonology-Phonetics group. We also thank three anonymous reviewers and the associate editor for comments that improved the final version. We are responsible for any remaining errors and oversights.

References

Akaike, H. (1974). A new look at the statistical model identification. IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control 19. 716723.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Avanesov, R. I. (1972). Russkoe literaturnoe proiznosenie. [Literary pronunciation of Russian.] Moscow: Prosvescenie.Google Scholar
Baayen, R. Harald & Milin, Petar (2010). Analyzing reaction times. International Journal of Psychological Research 3:2. 1228.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Babel, Molly & Johnson, Keith (2007). Cross-linguistic differences in the perception of palatalization. In Trouvain, Jürgen & Barry, William J. (eds.) Proceedings of the 16th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences. Saarbrücken: Saarland University. 749752.Google Scholar
Bagemihl, Bruce (1989). The crossing constraint and ‘backwards languages’. NLLT 7. 481549.Google Scholar
Barlow, Jessica A. (2001). Individual differences in the production of initial consonant sequences in Pig Latin. Lingua 111. 667696.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bates, Douglas M., Maechler, Martin & Bolker, Ben (2014). Package ‘lme4’: linear mixed-effects models using Eigen and S4. Version 1.1-7. https://CRAN.R-project.org/package=lme4.Google Scholar
Bernstein, N. (1967). The co-ordination and regulation of movements. 1st English edn. Oxford: Pergamon Press.Google Scholar
Berry, Jeffrey J. (2011). Accuracy of the NDI Wave Speech Research System. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research 54. 12951301.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Bombien, Lasse, Mooshammer, Christine & Hoole, Philip (2013). Articulatory coordination in word-initial clusters of German. JPh 41. 546561.Google Scholar
Borroff, Marianne L. (2007). A landmark underspecification account of the patterning of glottal stop. PhD dissertation, Stony Brook University.Google Scholar
Browman, Catherine P. & Goldstein, Louis (1986). Towards an articulatory phonology. Phonology Yearbook 3. 219252.Google Scholar
Browman, Catherine P. & Goldstein, Louis (1988). Some notes on syllable structure in articulatory phonology. Phonetica 45. 140155.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Browman, Catherine P. & Goldstein, Louis (1989). Articulatory gestures as phonological units. Phonology 6. 201251.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Browman, Catherine P. & Goldstein, Louis (1990). Gestural specification using dynamically-defined articulatory structures. JPh 18. 299320.Google Scholar
Browman, Catherine P. & Goldstein, Louis (1995a). Dynamics and articulatory phonology. In Port, Robert F. & van Gelder, Timothy (eds.) Mind as motion: explorations in the dynamics of cognition. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. 175193.Google Scholar
Browman, Catherine P. & Goldstein, Louis (1995b). Gestural syllable position effects in American English. In Bell-Berti, Fredericka & Raphael, Lawrence (eds.) Producing speech: contemporary issues. For Katherine Safford Harris. Woodbury, NY: American Institute of Physics Press. 1933.Google Scholar
Browman, Catherine P. & Goldstein, Louis (2000). Competing constraints on intergestural coordination and self-organization of phonological structures. Bulletin de la Communication Parlée 5. 2534.Google Scholar
Brunner, Jana, Geng, Christian, Sotiropoulou, Stavroula & Gafos, Adamantios (2014). Timing of German onset and word boundary clusters. Laboratory Phonology 5. 403454.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Burnham, Kenneth P. & Anderson, David R. (eds.) (1998). Model selection and multimodel inference: a practical information-theoretic approach. New York: Springer. 75117.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Burnham, Kenneth P., Anderson, David R. & Huyvaert, Kathryn P. (2011). AIC model selection and multimodel inference in behavioral ecology: some background, observations, and comparisons. Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology 65. 2335.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Calhoun, Sasha, Escudero, Paola, Tabain, Marija & Warren, Paul (eds.) (2019). Proceedings of the 19th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences. Canberra: Australasian Speech Science and Technology Association.Google Scholar
Campbell, Eric W. (2020). Probing phonological structure in play language: speaking backwards in Zenzontepec Chatino. Phonological Data and Analysis 2:1. 121. https://doi.org/10.3765/pda.v2art1.33.Google Scholar
Clements, G. N. (1999). Affricates as noncontoured stops. In Fujimura, Osamu, Joseph, Brian D. & Palek, Bohumil (eds.) Proceedings of LP ’98: item order in language and speech. Prague: Karolinum. 271299.Google Scholar
Cohen Priva, Uriel (2017). Informativity and the actuation of lenition. Lg 93. 569597.Google Scholar
Coupé, Christophe, Oh, Yoon Mi, Dediu, Dan & Pellegrino, François (2019). Different languages, similar encoding efficiency: comparable information rates across the human communicative niche. Science Advances 5. https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.aaw2594.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Davidson, Lisa & Roon, Kevin (2008). Durational correlates for differentiating consonant sequences in Russian. Journal of the International Phonetic Association 38. 137165.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Davis, Stuart & Hammond, Michael (1995). On the status of onglides in American English. Phonology 12. 159182.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Diehm, E. E. (1998). Gestures and linguistic function in learning Russian: production and perception studies of Russian palatalized consonants. PhD dissertation, Ohio State University.Google Scholar
Durvasula, Karthik, Ruthan, Mohammed Qasem, Heidenreich, Sarah & Lin, Yen-Hwei (2021). Probing syllable structure through acoustic measurements: case studies on American English and Jazani Arabic. Phonology 38. 173202.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Feinsilver, Lillian Mermin (1961). On Yiddish shm-. American Speech 36. 302303.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fowler, Carol A. (1980). Coarticulation and theories of extrinsic timing. JPh 8. 113133.Google Scholar
Gafos, Adamantios I. (2002). A grammar of gestural coordination. NLLT 20. 269337.Google Scholar
Gafos, Adamantios I., Roeser, Jens, Sotiropoulou, Stavroula, Hoole, Philip & Zeroual, Chakir (2020). Structure in mind, structure in vocal tract. NLLT 38. 4375.Google Scholar
Gao, Man (2008). Mandarin tones: an Articulatory Phonology account. PhD dissertation, Yale University.Google Scholar
Garcia, Damien (2010). Robust smoothing of gridded data in one and higher dimensions with missing values. Computational Statistics and Data Analysis 54. 11671178.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Geissler, Christopher, Shaw, Jason A., Tiede, Mark & Hu, Fang (2021). Eccentric C-V timing across speakers of diaspora Tibetan with and without lexical tone contrasts. Proceedings of the 12th International Seminar on Speech Production (ISSP 2020). https://issp2020.yale.edu/ProcISSP2020.pdf.Google Scholar
Geraghty, Paul A. (1983). The history of the Fijian languages. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press.Google Scholar
Goldstein, Louis (2011). Back to the past tense in English. In Gutiérrez-Bravo, Rodrigo, Mikkelsen, Line & Potsdam, Eric (eds.) Representing language: essays in honor of Judith Aissen. Santa Cruz: Linguistics Research Center. 6988.Google Scholar
Goldstein, Louis, Nam, Hosung, Saltzman, Elliot & Chitoran, Ioana (2009). Coupled oscillator planning model of speech timing and syllable structure. In Fant, G., Fujisaki, H. & Shen, J. (eds.) Frontiers in phonetics and speech science: Festschrift for Wu Zongji. Beijing: Commercial Press. 239249.Google Scholar
Gouskova, Maria & Stanton, Juliet (2021). Learning complex segments. Lg 97. 151193.Google Scholar
Gussmann, Edmund (2007). The phonology of Polish. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Haas, Mary R. (1977). Nasals and nasalization in Creek. BLS 3. 194203.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Haken, Hermann, Scott Kelso, J. A. & Bunz, Heinz (1985). A theoretical model of phase transitions in human hand movements. Biological Cybernetics 51. 347356.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Hombert, Jean-Marie (1986). Word games: some implications for analysis of tone and other phonological constructs. In Ohala, John J. & Jaeger, Jeri J. (eds.) Experimental phonology. Orlando: Academic Press. 175186.Google Scholar
Hu, Fang (2016). Tones are not abstract autosegmentals. In Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Speech Prosody. 302–306. https://www.isca-speech.org/archive_v0/SpeechProsody_2016/pdfs/134.pdf.Google Scholar
Hualde, José Ignacio (1988). Affricates are not contour segments. WCCFL 7. 143157.Google Scholar
Idsardi, William J. & Raimy, Eric (2005). Remarks on language play. Ms, University of Maryland & University of Wisconsin, Madison.Google Scholar
Karlin, Robin (2018). Towards an articulatory model of tone: a cross-linguistic investigation. PhD dissertation, Cornell University.Google Scholar
Kochetov, Alexei (2006). Syllable position effects and gestural organization: articulatory evidence from Russian. In Goldstein, Louis, Whalen, D. H. & Best, Catherine T. (eds.) Papers in Laboratory Phonology 8. Berlin & New York: Mouton de Gruyter. 565588.Google Scholar
Kochetov, Alexei (2013). Production, perception, and emergent phonotactic patterns: a case of contrastive palatalization. 2nd edn. New York & London: Routledge.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kröger, Bernd J., Schröder, Georg & Opgen-Rhein, Claudia (1995). A gesture-based dynamic model describing articulatory movement data. JASA 98. 18781889.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kugler, Peter N., Scott Kelso, J. A. & Turvey, Michael T. (1982). On the control and co-ordination of naturally developing systems. In Scott Kelso, J. A. & Clark, Jane E. (eds.) The development of movement control and co-ordination. New York: Wiley. 578.Google Scholar
Ladefoged, Peter & Maddieson, Ian (1996). The sounds of the world's languages. Oxford & Malden, MA: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Lombardi, Linda (1990). The nonlinear organization of the affricate. NLLT 8. 375425.Google Scholar
McCarthy, John J. & Prince, Alan (1986). Prosodic morphology. Ms, University of Massachusetts, Amherst & Brandeis University.Google Scholar
McGowan, R. S. & Saltzman, E. L. (1995). Incorporating aerodynamic and laryngeal components into task dynamics. JPh 23. 255269.Google Scholar
Maddieson, Ian (1989). Prenasalized stops and speech timing. Journal of the International Phonetic Association 19. 5766.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Marin, Stefania (2013). The temporal organization of complex onsets and codas in Romanian: a gestural approach. JPh 41. 211227.Google Scholar
Martin, Jack B. & Mauldin, Margaret McKane (2000). A dictionary of Creek/Muskogee, with notes on the Florida and Oklahoma Seminole dialects of Creek. Lincoln & London: University of Nebraska Press.Google Scholar
Nam, Hosung (2007). Syllable-level intergestural timing model: split-gesture dynamics focusing on positional asymmetry and moraic structure. In Cole, Jennifer & Hualde, Jose Ignacio (eds.) Laboratory phonology 9. Berlin & New York: Mouton de Gruyter. 483506.Google Scholar
Nam, Hosung, Goldstein, Louis & Saltzman, Elliot (2009). Self-organization of syllable structure: a coupled oscillator model. In Pellegrino, François, Marisco, Egidio, Chitoran, Ioana & Coupé, Christophe (eds.) Approaches to phonological complexity. Berlin & New York: Mouton de Gruyter. 299328.Google Scholar
Nevins, Andrew & Vaux, Bert (2003). Metalinguistic, shmetalinguistic: the phonology of shm-reduplication. CLS 39. 702721.Google Scholar
Oh, Miran, Byrd, Dani, Goldstein, Louis & Narayanan, Shrikanth S. (2020). Velum-oral timing and its variability in Korean nasal consonants. Poster presented at the 12th International Seminar on Speech Production (ISSP), Haskins Laboratories. https://issp2020.yale.edu/S08/oh_08_13_135_poster.pdf.Google Scholar
Oh, Sejin, Shaw, Jason A., Durvasula, Karthik & Kochetov, Alexei (2020). Russian palatalization as incomplete neutralization. Poster presented at the 12th International Seminar on Speech Production (ISSP), Haskins Laboratories. https://issp2020.yale.edu/S10/oh_10_20_219_poster.pdf.Google Scholar
Parrell, Benjamin & Lammert, Adam C. (2019). Bridging dynamical systems and optimal trajectory approaches to speech motor control with dynamic movement primitives. Frontiers in Psychology 10:2251. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2019.02251.Google Scholar
Pastätter, Manfred & Pouplier, Marianne (2017). Articulatory mechanisms underlying onset-vowel organization. JPh 65. 114.Google Scholar
Pouplier, Marianne (2020). Articulatory Phonology. In Aronoff, Mark (ed.) Oxford research encyclopedia of linguistics. Oxford: Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780199384655.013.745.Google Scholar
Pouplier, Marianne, Marin, Stefania, Hoole, Philip & Kochetov, Alexei (2017). Speech rate effects in Russian onset clusters are modulated by frequency, but not auditory cue robustness. JPh 64. 108126.Google Scholar
Rubach, Jerzy (1994). Affricates as strident stops in Polish. LI 25. 119143.Google Scholar
Ruthan, Mohammed Qasem, Durvasula, Karthik & Lin, Yen-Hwei (2019). Temporal coordination and sonority of Jazani Arabic word-initial clusters. In Hout, Katherine, Mai, Anna, McCollum, Adam, Rose, Sharon & Zaslansky, Matt (eds.) Proceedings of the 2018 Annual Meeting on Phonology. https://doi.org/10.3765/amp.v7i0.4485.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sagey, Elizabeth (1986). The representation of features and relations in nonlinear phonology. PhD dissertation, MIT.Google Scholar
Saltzman, Elliot L. & Munhall, Kevin G. (1989). A dynamical approach to gestural patterning in speech production. Ecological Psychology 1. 333382.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Shaw, Jason A. & Chen, Wei-rong (2019). Spatially conditioned speech timing: evidence and implications. Frontiers in Psychology 10:2726. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2019.02726.Google Scholar
Shaw, Jason A., Durvasula, Karthik & Kochetov, Alexei (2019). The temporal basis of complex segments. In Calhoun et al. (2019). 676–679. https://www.internationalphoneticassociation.org/icphs-proceedings/ICPhS2019/papers/ICPhS_725.pdf.Google Scholar
Shaw, Jason A. & Gafos, Adamantios I. (2015). Stochastic time models of syllable structure. PLoS One 10(5). https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0124714.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Shaw, Jason A., Gafos, Adamantios I., Hoole, Philip & Zeroual, Chakir (2011). Dynamic invariance in the phonetic expression of syllable structure: a case study of Moroccan Arabic consonant clusters. Phonology 28. 455490.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Shaw, Jason A. & Kawahara, Shigeto (2019). Effects of surprisal and entropy on vowel duration in Japanese. Language and Speech 62. 80114.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sherzer, Joel (1970). Talking backwards in Cuna: the sociological reality of phonological descriptions. Southwestern Journal of Anthropology 26. 343353.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Silverman, Daniel (1997). Phasing and recoverability. New York: Garland.Google Scholar
Sorensen, Tanner & Gafos, Adamantios (2016). The gesture as an autonomous nonlinear dynamical system. Ecological Psychology 28. 188215.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sproat, Richard & Fujimura, Osamu (1993). Allophonic variation in English /l/ and its implications for phonetic implementation. JPh 21. 291311.Google Scholar
Strycharczuk, Patrycja, Derrick, Donald & Shaw, Jason A. (2020). Locating de-lateralization in the pathway of sound changes affecting coda /l/. Laboratory Phonology 11. https://doi.org/10.5334/labphon.236.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Suh, Yunju & Hwang, Jiwon (2016). The Korean prevocalic palatal glide: a comparison with the Russian glide and palatalization. Phonetica 73. 85100.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Tiede, Mark (2005). MVIEW: software for visualization and analysis of concurrently recorded movement data. New Haven, CT: Haskins Laboratories.Google Scholar
Tilsen, Sam (2017). Exertive modulation of speech and articulatory phasing. JPh 64. 3450.Google Scholar
Timberlake, Alan (2004). A reference grammar of Russian. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Turk, Alice & Shattuck-Hufnagel, Stefanie (2020). Speech timing: implications for theories of phonology, speech production, and speech motor control. Oxford: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Turvey, M. T. (1990). Coordination. American Psychologist 45. 938953.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Umeda, Noriko (1977). Consonant duration in American English. JASA 61. 846858.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Vaux, Bert (2011). Language games. In Goldsmith, John, Riggle, Jason & Yu, Alan (eds.) The handbook of phonological theory. 2nd edn. Malden, MA & Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. 722750.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Vaux, Bert & Nevins, Andrew (2003). Underdetermination in language games: survey and analysis of Pig Latin dialects. Paper presented at the 77th Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America, Atlanta.Google Scholar
Vinogradov, G. S., Ivanova, E. A. & Gindin, S. I. (2005). Detskie tajnye jazyki: kratkij ocherk. [Children's secret languages: an overview.] Russkij Jazyk 16. 1425.Google Scholar
Westbury, J. R. (1994). X-ray microbeam speech production database user's handbook. Madison: University of Wisconsin, Madison.Google Scholar
Ying, Jia, Shaw, Jason A., Carignan, Christopher, Proctor, Michael, Derrick, Donald & Best, Catherine T. (2021). Evidence for active control of tongue lateralization in Australian English /l/. JPh 86. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.wocn.2021.101039.Google Scholar
Zhang, Muye, Geissler, Christopher & Shaw, Jason A. (2019). Gestural representations of tone in Mandarin: evidence from timing alternations. In Calhoun et al. (2019). 1803–1807. https://www.internationalphoneticassociation.org/icphs-proceedings/ICPhS2019/papers/ICPhS_1852.pdf.Google Scholar
Zsiga, Elizabeth C. (1995). An acoustic and electropalatographic study of lexical and postlexical palatalization in American English. In Connell, Bruce & Arvaniti, Amalia (eds.) Phonology and phonetic evidence: papers in laboratory phonology IV. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 282302.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Zsiga, Elizabeth C. (2000). Phonetic alignment constraints: consonant overlap and palatalization in English and Russian. JPh 28. 69102.Google Scholar
Zsiga, Elizabeth C. & Zec, Draga (2013). Contextual evidence for the representation of pitch accents in Standard Serbian. Language and Speech 56. 69104.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Supplementary material: PDF

Shaw et al. supplementary material

Shaw et al. supplementary material

Download Shaw et al. supplementary material(PDF)
PDF 160.1 KB