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