Abstract:

This study examined the coordination of tongue body and lip movements in VCV sequences, where the consonant is a bilabial stop /p, b/, and the vowel one of /i, a, u/; only asymmetrical vowel contexts were analyzed. Lip and tongue timing and vowel-to-vowel tongue body kinematics were examined. The movements were recorded using a magnetometer system. Four subjects participated and produced ten tokens of each sequence. The phasing between the onset of the lip closing movement and the onset of the tongue body movement from the first to the second vowel varied across subjects, with no obvious pattern according to consonant voicing or vowel context. Overall, the onset of the tongue movement to the second vowel started earlier relative to the lip closing movement as the length of the tongue movement trajectory increased. During the oral closure, 40%--80% of the tongue movement path was traversed, again with no clear pattern across subjects. Consonant voicing reliably influenced the tongue movement from the consonant release to the second vowel. During this interval, the tongue traversed a longer path for voiceless than for voiced stops, reflecting the longer voice onset time for the voiceless stops. [Work supported by NIH.]