Marios Fourakis
Ying Xu
Dept. of Speech and Hear. Sci., Ohio State Univ., 110 Pressey Hall, 1070 Carmack Rd., Columbus, OH 43210
The acoustic and articulatory aspects of anticipatory labial
coarticulation were examined. One female native speaker of American English
read a list containing ten repetitions of nonsense V1CV2 sequences where V1 was
always [i], C was one of [s], [(sh)], [z], [(yog)], and V2 was one of [i], [u],
or [a]. The movement of upper and lower lip and jaw were recorded using the
strain gauge apparatus developed by Barlow and colleagues, and the acoustic
signal was also recorded. Short term spectra were taken of the fricative noise
at the beginning and at intervals spaced at 0.25, 0.50, and 0.75 of the
duration of the fricative. Two spectral peaks were identified at each point. It
was predicted that the frequencies of those peaks would be affected by the
nature of the following vowel and that the coarse spectral track would show a
downward movement when the following vowel was [u]. Neither of these
predictions obtained. This result is in agreement with the EMG data of Gelfer
et al. [