Investigating the Stability of Intergestural Timing Relations

An articulatory analysis of lip and tongue coordination in VCV sequences is presented for four Slovak speakers. Lip and tongue movements are obtained for many utterances elicited in a manner that ensures great variation in both rate and in articulatory precision. Theory and models suggest that gestures might not be sequenced in simple linear order, but that medial consonant timing may be tied to the evolution of the following vowel gesture. We find that the relative timing of the consonant and second vowel gestures is most stable and exhibits least variability when the second vowel gesture provides the temporal reference frame. This work contributes to our understanding of non-linear coarticulatory effects in continuous, and variable, speech.