A Temporal Model of Speech Production

Attempts to model speech production processes based on abstract static units, such as syllables, phonemes, or features, fail to account for a number of observations of natural speech. For example. a phonetic feature such as lip rounding has been described as being anticipated varying numbers of consonant segments before the vowel for which it is specified. Such data conform to predictions made with models assuming a CnV syllable structure. Such models, however, fail to predict nasality anticipated in vowels preceding nasal consonants. On the other hand, feature‐based models that apparently account for observations of anticipated nasality fail to predict other coarticulatory phenomena, such as the suppression of lip‐rounding or tongue‐fronting activity during the production of an intervening consonant presumably containing no conflicting articulatory gesture. A model assuming that speech is specified segmentally with fixed timing relationships between the end and beginning of successive segments (and varia...