Acoustic and articulatory evidence for consonant‐vowel interactions

Previous acoustical research [e.g., C. Fowler, Phonetica 38, 35–50 (1981)] has suggested that consonants and vowels are not produced strictly sequentially but rather overlap in time. By this account, the degree of co‐production of underlying segments affects the pattern of the resulting acoustical durations. In the present experiment, two subjects produced utterances of the form CVC(C), where the vowels were either /e/ or /ae/ and the following consonants were /p/, /k/, /s/, /ps/, /ks/, /sp/, or /sk/, Movements of the lips and jaw were monitored with a Selspot system. Laryngeal movements were measured by means of transillumination, and the accompanying acoustic signal was recorded. Analysis of the acoustic durations revealed that vowel duration was shorter when followed by a cluster than by a singleton in both vowel contexts. However, the following consonant durations were longer for the vowel /e/ than for /ae/. Analyses of the lip and jaw kinematics suggested that the vowel shortening in the cluster contex...