ASA 126th Meeting Denver 1993 October 4-8

5aSP15. Velar coarticulation revisited.

Fredericka Bell-Berti

Dept. of Speech, Commun. Sci., and Theatre, St. John's Univ., Jamaica, NY 11439 and Haskins Labs., 270 Crown St., New Haven, CT 06511

Rena A. Krakow

Temple Univ., Philadelphia, PA 19122 and Haskins Labs., New Haven, CT 06511

Dorothy Ross

CUNY Graduate School, New York, NY 10036 and Haskins Labs., New Haven, CT 06511

Several models, embodying fundamentally different assumptions about the nature and organization of speech motor control, have been offered in explanation of observations of coarticulatory phenomena. A series of experiments has been undertaken to test specific predictions about the role of carryover coarticulation in delaying the normally stable onset of a velar gesture for a segment, made by Bell-Berti and Harris' coproduction model [F. Bell-Berti and K. S. Harris, Phonetica 38, 9--20 (1981); F. Bell-Berti, Phonet. Phonol. 5, 63--85 (1993)]. For example, the onset of velar lowering for a vowel or a nasal consonant following an obstruent will be delayed until near the end of the acoustic period of the obstruent (depending upon its duration), to insure adequate velopharyngeal closure for the obstruent. (That is, the velar gesture for a later segment is modified by the requirements for a preceding one.) Early results encourage the belief that it will be possible to account for anticipatory and carryover effects with a single model. [Work supported by NIDCD Grant No. DC-00121 to the Haskins Laboratories.]