Competing constraints on intergestural coordination and self-organization of phonological structures

Within the Articulatory Phonology framework, the notion of gestural structure plays a central role. The nature of such structures has been the focus of two related lines of recent research that we present here. One line involves a proposal to enrich gestural structures to include an explicit representation of the relative cohesiveness of pairs of gestures within an utterance. As it turns out, this simple addition to the model has unexpected and interesting explanatory consequences, one of which involves the phonetic and phonological properties of syllable structure. The second line involves developing a research strategy to account for the observed properties that gestural structures exhibit in languages using principles of self-organization.