Dynamics and articulatory phonology

Traditionally, the study of human speech and its patterning has been approached in two different ways. One way has been to consider it as mechanical or bio-mechanical activity (e.g., of articulators or air molecules or cochlear hair cells) that changes continuously in time. The other way has been to consider it as a linguistic (or cognitive) structure consisting of a sequence of elements chosen from a closed inventory. Development of the tools required to describe speech in one or the other of these approaches has proceeded largely in parallel, with one hardly informing the other at all (some notable exceptions are discussed below). As a result, speech has been seen as having two structures, one considered physical, and the other cognitive, where the relation between the t",:o structures is generally not an intrinsic part of eIther description. From this perspective, a complete picture requires 'translating' between the intrinsically incommensurate domains (as argued by Fowler, Rubin, Remez, & Turvey, 1980). The research we have been pursuing (Browman & Goldstein, 1986; 1989; 1990a,b; 1992) ('articulatory phonology') begins with the very different assumption that these apparently different domains are, in fact, the low and high dimensional descriptions of a single (complex) system. Crucial to this approach is identification of phonological units with dynamically specified units of articulatory action, called gestures. Thus an utterance is described as an act that can 'be decomposed into a small number of primitive units (a low dimensional description), in a particular spatio-temporal configuration.