Vowel coarticulation: Landmark statistics measure vowel aggression

Abstract

Regression analysis and mutual information have been used to measure the degree of dependence between a consonant and a vowel, and this has been used to identify the invariance of consonant place and to quantify the coarticulatory resistance of consonants [e.g., Fowler (1994). Percept. Psychophys. 55, 597-610]. This paper presents the first application of this approach to measure coarticulatory properties of vowels, using regression analysis and mutual information on articulatory data of CV syllables produced by seven Taiwan Mandarin speakers. The results show that vowel /i/ shares the most information with the preceding consonant among vowels for the tongue body, whereas vowels /a/ and /u/ are not significantly different from each other in that respect. For the lip articulator, the degree of information sharing for vowels is in the progression: /u/ > /i/ > /a/. Based on the CV model theory of gestural coordination (C-V in-phase relation) and the present results, this study proposes that landmark statistics for vowels reflect the degree of vowel aggression and that V-to-C effect is dominant over C-to-V effect in C-V coarticulation.

Effects of Surprisal and Entropy on Vowel Duration in Japanese

“…From the standpoint of our competition-based interpretation of entropy , this implies that /iː/ is acoustically shorter when there are more active vowel competitors (within the CV mora) and lengthened when there are fewer active competitors. One way that /i/ differs from other vowels that may be relevant to this result is in its coarticulatory aggression (Chen, Chang, & Iskarous, 2015; Iskarous et al, 2013; Recasens & Espinosa, 2009). Compared with other vowels, /i/ has a strong coarticulatory influence on neighboring segments (Chen et al, 2015).…”

Nasal coda neutralization in Shanghai Mandarin: Articulatory and perceptual evidence

“…Palatal segments, including front vowels and especially [i], have a relatively high coarticulatory resistance, making them insensitive to coarticulation with adjacent segments and more likely to impose their articulatory demands on those segments. Low vowels such as [a], on the other hand, have a lower coarticulatory resistance and are freer to vary contextually to accommodate adjacent segments' articulatory requirements (Stone & Vatikiotis-Bateson, 1995;Recasens & Espinosa, 2009;Recasens, 2012;Chen, Chang, & Iskarous, 2015;Recasens & Rodríguez, 2016). The articulatory requirements of producing non-low vowels may as such influence the course of nasal merger or neutralization, primarily in determining the outcome of merger: Articulatorily demanding vowels will tend to exert a larger influence on the non-contrastive place of nasals which effectively lack their own place targets, consistent with models of coarticulation and underspecification in phonetics (Keating, 1988a;Keating, 1988b;Bakovic, 2000).…”

Spatially Conditioned Speech Timing: Evidence and Implications

“…Brunner et al (2014) list the spatial position of the articulator as one of a number of factors that influences measures of gesture coordination, leading to consonant-specific variation in timing patterns in German. Pastätter and Pouplier (2017) investigated whether coarticulatory resistance, a measure of the degree to which an articulator resists spatial perturbation (Bladon and Al-Bamerni, 1976; Recasens and Espinosa, 2009; Chen et al, 2015) influences the relative timing of a consonant and following vowel. In line with their hypotheses, overlap between a consonant and vowel was affected by the coarticulatory resistance of the consonant.…”