Velar coarticulation in French: an electromyographic study

Abstract: EMG activity was recorded from the levator veli palatini and the palatoglossus of a native speaker of French. The corpus included isolated CVC sequences, isolated VCV sequences, and specially constructed utterances. Velar control and nasalization do not appear to be controlled by a simple binary mechanism. In particular nasalized vowels and nasal consonants appear to be controlled in different ways. Anticipatory coarticulation is observed in numerous instances, whereas carryover coarticulation is not observed in the case of EMG suppression. No syllable boundary effect was observed for coarticulation. This is in agreement with other data on French, but not with data on Japanese.