Articulatory overlap as a function of voicing in French and German consonant clusters

Abstract

The effects of laryngeal specification on the timing of supra-laryngeal articulations have so far received little attention. Previous research has shown that German-but not French-mixed-voicing clusters are produced with less articulatory overlap than phonologically fully voiced clusters. Articulatory and acoustic data of labial and velar stops as simple onsets and in stop + /l/ clusters are examined to probe the causes for this cross-linguistic difference in the light of the different voicing implementations of French and German. The absence of overlap in German mixed-voicing clusters is attributed to the requirement of a time slot for the stop's aspiration phase. Since French does not commonly have aspirated stops, French clusters are expected to pattern with the voiced German clusters. The results confirm that voicing patterns established for simple onsets in the literature in terms of voice onset time of both German and French also obtain in clusters. Furthermore, the data show that contrary to the expectations French clusters pattern with German mixed-voicing clusters. This low degree of overlap in both voiceless and voiced French clusters indicates that overlap is restricted by aerodynamic requirements which result from the implementations of the voicing contrast.

A Cross-Language Study of Laryngeal-Oral Coordination Across Varying Prosodic and Syllable-Structure Conditions

“…The fairly large range of variation for VOT in the French data of Figure 4 indicates that, currently, the language has a fair amount of latitude in timing of voice onset. This may also explain why the French VOT values found here are higher than those found, for example, in our own previous work (Bombien & Hoole, 2013). Because of the constraints of the transillumination technique, all of the target consonants were followed by a high vowel (whereas in our earlier experiment, which used electromagnetic articulography, we used predominantly low vowels).…”

“…For any given item, consider the effect of varying the position of the right edge of the P bar while keeping the total length of the ABD and ADD bars constant. For more background for such a scenario, see, e.g., Bombien & Hoole, 2013;Hutters, 1985.) The pattern for relative timing of peak glottal opening shown in Figure 5 follows the VOT pattern very closely, which is not surprising because the timing of peak glottal opening is the interarticulatory coordination relation most directly responsible for VOT at the acoustic surface.…”

Timing of German onset and word boundary clusters

“…This finding is in line with an earlier one by Pouplier (2012), which reports about the same lag duration for /bl/ as for /pl/ (her Figure 3). As an explanation for this finding, Bombien and Hoole (2013) discuss different oral-laryngeal coupling relations. Whereas in German clusters, all oral gestures are assumed to be coupled to one laryngeal gesture, in French, each oral gesture has its own coordination with a glottal gesture.…”

“…1 As a result of that, the prevocalic consonant is delayed. This hypothesis was tested by Bombien and Hoole (2013). They compared lag durations in German and French /kl, gl, pl/ and /bl/.…”

The role of sonority profile and order of place of articulation on gestural overlap in Georgian

“…Overlap between consonants is both language-specific [16] [17] and determined by a variety of factors [17] [19]. Order of place of articulation affects degree of overlap; research on Georgian [4], French [20] and Korean [21] has shown that back-to-front clusters are less overlapped than front-to-back clusters.…”