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Recently (Hoole, Mooshammer & Tillmann, 1994), we compared with Electromagnetic Articulography the kinematic properties of German tense and lax vowels over changes in speech rate: They appeared not to differ in the internal organisation of the elementary CV and VC movements, but the lax vowels showed tighter serial coupling of CV to VC movement. These results were suggestive given the strong phonological tradition (on a phonetically elusive substrate) of accounting for the differences between these vowels at the level of word prosody (especially in the link between vowel and following consonant). Nevertheless, important questions had remained open: Firstly, analysis of the velocity profiles of the CV and VC movements had been based on a parameter (ratio of peak to average velocity) that may not capture all relevant differences. Secondly, it was unclear whether tense-lax differences are equally clear-cut for all vowel subcategories (e.g high, low, rounded, unrounded) and also for different consonantal contexts. The more refined and extensive analyses carried out in the present contribution essentially confirmed the wellfoundedness of the earlier preliminary conclusions.

A simultaneous EPG/EMA study of tongue gestures of five speakers was conducted to investigate the kinematic events accompanying alveolar stop reductions in the context of a velar plosive /k/ and in the context of a laryngeal fricative /h/ in two languages, English and German. No systematic language differences could be detected. Alveolar productions before a following /h/ showed only a marginal weakening of the formation of complete occlusion, while alveolar productions before a following /k/ showed a wide range of reductions, including instances of a complete deletion of the alveolar gesture. The extension of movement reduction varied between and within subjects. Importantly, while speakers were consistent with themselves, they employed different articulatory patterns with respect to the timing relationship between movement initiation, overall movement duration, peak velocity as well as closure duration. An attempt is made to relate the observed movement patterns to the dynamic factors of the speech mechanism.

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