An EPG + UTI study of syllable onset and coda coordination and coarticulation in Italian

Abstract

This study has two purposes. The first is that of implementing a system for the processing of multi-level speech data, which allows the synchronized acquisition and processing of electropalatographic, ultrasound tongue imaging and acoustic data. The second is that of testing the multi-level speech data system on a subset of Italian CV and VC sequences to ascertain how intersegmental coordination and coarticulation are related. We analyse onset-nucleus and nucleus-coda temporal relationships for three different consonants (/s/, /l/ and /k/) adjacent to either /a/ or /i/. Based on multi-level phonetic data on constriction location and overall tongue configuration, we show that the three consonants have different coarticulation properties and that these properties may in part explain the differences observed in the domain of temporal coordination between the consonant and the vocalic nucleus.