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Articulatory gestures as phonological units*
- Catherine P. Browman, Louis Goldstein
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We have argued that dynamically defined articulatory gestures are the appropriate units to serve as the atoms of phonological representation. Gestures are a natural unit, not only because they involve task-oriented movements of the articulators, but because they arguably emerge as prelinguistic discrete units of action in infants. The use of gestures, rather than constellations of gestures as in Root nodes, as basic units of description makes it possible to characterise a variety of language patterns in which gestural organisation varies. Such patterns range from the misorderings of disordered speech through phonological rules involving gestural overlap and deletion to historical changes in which the overlap of gestures provides a crucial explanatory element.
Gestures can participate in language patterns involving overlap because they are spatiotemporal in nature and therefore have internal duration. In addition, gestures differ from current theories of feature geometry by including the constriction degree as an inherent part of the gesture. Since the gestural constrictions occur in the vocal tract, which can be charactensed in terms of tube geometry, all the levels of the vocal tract will be constricted, leading to a constriction degree hierarchy. The values of the constriction degree at each higher level node in the hierarchy can be predicted on the basis of the percolation principles and tube geometry. In this way, the use of gestures as atoms can be reconciled with the use of Constriction degree at various levels in the vocal tract (or feature geometry) hierarchy.
The phonological notation developed for the gestural approach might usefully be incorporated, in whole or in part, into other phonologies. Five components of the notation were discussed, all derived from the basic premise that gestures are the primitive phonological unit, organised into gestural scores. These components include (1) constriction degree as a subordinate of the articulator node and (2) stiffness (duration) as a subordinate of the articulator node. That is, both CD and duration are inherent to the gesture. The gestures are arranged in gestural scores using (3) articulatory tiers, with (4) the relevant geometry (articulatory, tube or feature) indicated to the left of the score and (5) structural information above the score, if desired. Association lines can also be used to indicate how the gestures are combined into phonological units. Thus, gestures can serve both as characterisations of articulatory movement data and as the atoms of phonological representation.
Towards an articulatory phonology
- Catherine P. Browman, Louis M. Goldstein
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- Journal:
- Phonology Yearbook / Volume 3 / May 1986
- Published online by Cambridge University Press:
- 20 October 2008, pp. 219-252
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We propose an approach to phonological representation based on describing an utterance as an organised pattern of overlapping articulatory gestures. Because movement is inherent in our definition of gestures, these gestural ‘constellations’ can account for both spatial and temporal properties of speech in a relatively simple way. At the same time, taken as phonological representations, such gestural analyses offer many of the same advantages provided by recent nonlinear phonological theories, and we give examples of how gestural analyses simplify the description of such ‘complex segments’ as /s/–stop clusters and prenasalised stops. Thus, gestural structures can be seen as providing a principled link between phonological and physical description.
23 - Assimilation as gestural overlap: comments on Hoist and Nolan
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- By Catherine P. Browman, Haskins Laboratories
- Edited by Bruce Connell, University of Oxford, Amalia Arvaniti, University of Edinburgh
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- Phonology and Phonetic Evidence
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- 03 May 2011
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- 14 September 1995, pp 334-342
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Summary
The Hoist & Nolan paper makes a welcome contribution to the work on assimilation. It is not, however, as definitive as one would like, given the relatively large number of subjects that were used in the study. In particular, the classification of their type D is problematic. They use acoustic durational data and spectral data, neither of which, I argue below, supports the conclusion they draw. In fact, although it is impossible to know for sure with acoustic data, the Hoist & Nolan data might be consistent with an analysis of all the types - A through D - as increasing gestural overlap.
In addition to the above point, the Hoist & Nolan paper purports to show that gestural overlap is not affected by syntactic processes. This claim is not supported either by their own data or by data from Hardcastle. That is, gestural overlap does appear to be affected by syntactic processes.
[s] to [∫] assimilation
Hoist and Nolan present us with two kinds of analyses, analyses of the spectra and of the acoustic durations of sentence pairs like [with commas added – CPB]:
Before a shop assistant restocks shelves, all old produce must be removed. Before a shop assistant restocks, shelves ought to be at least half empty.
They divide the spectra into four types, A through D, in which type A has two essentially stable patterns of acoustic energy, often separated by a silent pause, types B and C glide between a more [∫]–like and a more [∫]–like pattern, and type D has a single pattern of acoustic energy.
19 - Lip aperture and consonant releases
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- By Catherine P, Browman
- Edited by Patricia A. Keating
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- Book:
- Phonological Structure and Phonetic Form
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- 26 February 2010
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- 05 May 1994, pp 331-353
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Summary
Introduction
The focus of this paper is, simply put, how the mouth is opened during vowels in CV (sub)syllables. Such a question is intimately related to the nature both of consonant releases and of lip control (as in rounding). The function of controlling the lips for vowels might be to ensure that the mouth is open during the vowel, so that there will be radiated sound. If this is the case, then actively controlled consonant-release movements, which would serve the same purpose, might not be necessary; the mouth might open sufficiently, given the lip control, if the consonant is simply turned off without actively moving away from its position of closure.
Much previous work has viewed the relation between consonants and vowels as a linear phenomenon. In a CV syllable or subsyllable, the consonant is considered to occur first, followed by the transition from the consonant into the vowel, and finally the vowel. In the acoustic instantiation of such a perspective, the transition from consonant to vowel often consists of two parts, at least for plosives: a burst (plus any aspiration) followed by formant transitions (e.g. Cooper et al. 1952; Fant 1973). The importance of the acoustic properties of the release for characterizing stop consonants has been emphasized by authors such as Stevens and Blumstein (1981).
However, it is in fact not possible to separate consonantal and vocalic information temporally. As emphasized by Liberman et al. (1967), both the burst and the formant transitions are affected by both the vowel and the consonant, due to the overlapping articulations involved. Articulatorily, consonants and vowels are not linearly organized.
2 - “Targetless” schwa: an articulatory analysis
- from Section A - Gesture
- Edited by Gerard J. Docherty, University of Newcastle upon Tyne, D. Robert Ladd, University of Edinburgh
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- Book:
- Gesture, Segment, Prosody
- Published online:
- 18 December 2009
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- 14 May 1992, pp 26-67
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Summary
Introduction
One of the major goals for a theory of phonetic and phonological structure is to be able to account for the (apparent) contextual variation of phonological units in as general and simple a way as possible. While it is always possible to state some pattern of variation using a special “low-level” rule that changes the specification of some unit, recent approaches have attempted to avoid stipulating such rules, and instead propose that variation is often the consequence of how the phonological units, properly defined, are organized. Two types of organization have been suggested that lead to the natural emergence of certain types of variation: one is that invariantly specified phonetic units may overlap in time, i.e., they may be coproduced (e.g., Fowler 1977, 1981a; Bell-Berti and Harris 1981; Liberman and Mattingly 1985; Browman and Goldstein 1990), so that the overall tract shape and acoustic consequences of these coproduced units will reflect their combined influence; a second is that a given phonetic unit may be unspecified for some dimension(s) (e.g., Öhman 1966b; Keating 1988a), so that the apparent variation along that dimension is due to continuous trajectories between neighboring units' specifications for that dimension.
A particularly interesting case of contextual variation involves reduced (schwa) vowels in English. Investigations have shown that these vowels are particularly malleable: they take on the acoustic (Fowler 1981a) and articulatory (e.g., Alfonso and Baer 1982) properties of neighboring vowels.
19 - Tiers in articulatory phonology, with some implications for casual speech
- Edited by John Kingston, Cornell University, New York, Mary E. Beckman, Ohio State University
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- Book:
- Papers in Laboratory Phonology
- Published online:
- 08 February 2010
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- 30 November 1990, pp 341-376
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Summary
Introduction
We have recently begun a research program with the goal of providing explicit, formal representations of articulatory organization appropriate for use as phonological representations (Browman and Goldstein 1986; Goldstein and Browman 1986). The basic assumption underlying this research program is that much phonological organization arises from constraints imposed by physical systems. This is of course a common assumption with respect to the elements – features – used in phonological description; it is not such a common assumption, at least in recent years, with respect to the organization of phonological structures. In our view, phonological structure is an interaction of acoustic, articulatory, and other (e.g. psychological and/or purely linguistic) organizations. We are focusing on articulatory organization because we believe that the inherently multidimensional nature of articulation can explain a number of phonological phenomena, particularly those that involve overlapping articulatory gestures. Thus, we represent linguistic structures in terms of coordinated articulatory movements, called gestures, that are themselves organized into a gestural score that resembles an autosegmental representation.
In order to provide an explicit and testable formulation of these structures, we are developing a computational model in conjunction with our colleagues Elliot Saltzman and Phil Rubin at Haskins Laboratories (Browman, Goldstein, Kelso, Rubin and Saltzman 1984; Browman, Goldstein, Saltzman, and Smith 1986). Figure 19.1 displays a schematic outline of this model, which generates speech from symbolic input.
As can be seen from the number of submodels in the figure, gestures are relatively abstract. Even articulatory trajectories are one step more abstract than the output speech signal – they serve as input to the vocal tract model (Rubin, Baer, and Mermelstein 1981), which generates an acoustic signal.