An electropalatographic and acoustic study of consonant-to-vowel coarticulation

Coarticulatory effects from consonants on vowels were investigated using electropalatography and acoustical analysis. The electropalatographic data conform with an articulatory classification of vowels into front and back categories. Moreover, vowels are shown to differ in their degree of sensitivity to coarticulatory effects from the adjacent consonants. In general, consonant-dependent effects are larger upon those articulatory regions which do not intervene in the formation of a vowel constriction, although compensatory variation in other gestures (e.g., lip rounding) must be invoked to interpret the highly variable pattern of lingual coarticulation for [u]. The paper also concludes that the degree of C-to-V coarticulation is influenced by the production requirements on the consonant; that explains why the degree of linguopalatal contact for [i] is more affected by the velarized alveolar lateral [l] than by other consonants. The electropalatographic data are generally correlated with acoustic (F2) data, with greater variation in F2 frequency in those vowels showing greater variation in linguopalatal contact area.