VOWELS IN STANDARD AUSTRIAN GERMAN - Acoustics ...

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Vowels in Standard Austrian German
Another widely read view defines coarticulation as overlap of segments in time
and space (e.g. Lindblom 1983, Nakamura 2005, Tabain 2001, Farnetani 1997):
"The motor events of a sequence of phonemes overlap in space and time. In pronouncing, for
example, [ku], the speaker begins to round and protrude his lips in anticipation of [u] before
the release of the tongue closure for [k]. This spatial and temporal overlap of adjacent
gestures is a very general phenomenon and can be observed in all languages. The term for it
is coarticulation." (Lindblom 1983: 220)
"During the movements of different articulators for the production of successive phonetic
segments overlap in time and interact with one another. As a consequence, the vocal tract
configuration at any point in time is influenced by more than one segment. This is what the
term "coarticulation" describes." (Farnetani 1997: 371)
"...that the movements of an articulatory organ overlap in time with those of different
articulatory organs or different parts of the same organ. This is called coarticulation, the
realisation of which is determined language-specifically." (Nakamura 2005: 1)
This view of coarticulation as segmental overlap is rather broad as well, comprising a
vast amount of phenomena in the organization of connected speech, whereas others see
coarticulation as the neuromuscular production of movements. The latter conceptuali-
zation often sees coarticulation as partly planned (Wood 1996, 1997, Ostry et al. 1996,
Dang et al. 2004).
"Coarticulation is a natural phenomenon involved in human speech, which originates from
movement planning strategies and from physical interactions among speech articulators."
(Dang et al. 2004: 25)
"The sounds of speech may be combined in various ways, and the associated articulator
movements may vary as the kinematic context changes. This kinematic variation, known as
coarticulation, is one of the most pervasive characteristics of speech production. Some
aspects of coarticulation may be centrally planned, whereas others may not be planned but
may arise from factors such as muscle mechanics, musculoskeletal geometry, and jaw
dynamics." (Ostry et al. 1996: 1570)
Recasens (1999), who defines coarticulation as temporal coproduction of gestures,
claims to make a distinction between "articulation proper" and "gestural overlap":
"Moreover, a distinction should probably be made between coarticulation proper and
gestural overlap: inspection of articulatory data reveals, for example, that the gesture for a
vowel may coarticulate slightly with that for a following consonant before the well-defined
onset of the consonantal gesture actually occurs. Unfortunately much of the data reported in
the literature have been taken at individual points in time along particular utterances and
thus, do not allow disentangling these two notions." (Recasens 1999: 81)