Gestural Cohesion and Timing in Speech Production
Emmy Noether Research Group
funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft
Members
Marianne Pouplier (Principal Investigator), Stefania Marin
Project
summary
How to negotiate the
tension between the cognitive and physical properties of speech has been a
central issue in linguistics for many decades and much recent influential
research is built on the insight that phonology and phonetics inform each other
(e.g., Boersma
1998; Pierrehumbert 2000; Prince & Smolensky 2004). The framework of
articulatory phonology has also gained recognition as a model of grammar which
argues that the spatiotemporal coordination of speech events is an integral
part of phonological representation. This model claims that important insights
into the nature of linguistic units and the speech production process can be
gained under the assumption that these are grounded in the coordination of
linguistically significant vocal tract events, so-called gestures (Browman
& Goldstein 1990; Fowler et al. 1980). This theoretical
framework explicitly models the temporal coordination of speech events and thus
allows us to formulate and empirically test hypotheses about the relation of
the observable, physical principles of speech to cognitive representations.
The current project
investigates speech errors and the organization of sounds into syllables,
aiming for a new understanding of the relation between abstract phonological
planning and the physical implementation of speech. The questions addressed
here speak to the much debated issue whether regularities occurring when
individual sounds combine, erroneously in slips of the tongue and non-errorfully in syllabic organization, can adequately be
captured as manipulation of linear sequences of symbolic units. Doubt has been
cast on the long-standing assumption of symbolic segments particularly through
the increasing availability of articulatory records of speech. These suggest
for instance that speech errors attributed to categorical segmental
replacements may in fact be gradient intrusions of articulatory gestures.
Traditionally it has been assumed that the units of speech production are
symbolic segments consisting of atemporal
phonological feature bundles which are mapped onto dynamic specifications only
when the encoded phonological structure is about to be uttered. Evidence for
this view has come, among others, from the combinatorial properties of
segments: The errorful combination of sounds in
speech errors has long been understood to be a serial misordering
in a linear string of symbolic segments. Also the combination of sounds into
onset, nucleus and coda has traditionally been described on the basis of a
linear string of segments, governed by the syllable hierarchy, although the
empirical status of the segment has never been uncontroversial. The current
project uses speech errors and syllabic organization to test the hypothesis
that, at least in some cases, these phenomena may reflect complex molecular
constellations comprised of articulatory gestures, and do not necessarily
implicate abstract symbolic structures.
Start date: May 2007
Publications
Pouplier, M. & Waltl, S. (2008). Articulatory timing of coproduced gestures and its implications for
models of speech production. Proceedings of the 8th
International Seminar of Speech Production, Strasbourg.
Marin,
S. & Pouplier, M. (2008). Organization of
Complex Onsets and Codas in American English: Evidence for a Competitive
Coupling Model. Proceedings of the 8th International Seminar
of Speech Production, Strasbourg.
Kochetov, A. & Pouplier, M. (2008) Phonetic variability and grammatical
knowledge.
An articulatory study of Korean place assimilation. Phonology 25(3),
433-468.
Pouplier, M. & Goldstein,
L. Intention in Articulation (2010). Articulatory timing of
coproduced gestures and its implications for models of speech production.
Language and Cognitive Processes,
25(5), 616-649.
Marin,
S., Pouplier, M. & Harrington J.
(2010). Acoustic
consequences of articulatory variability during productions of /t/ and /k/ and
its implications for speech error research. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 127(1), 445-461.
Scobbie, J. & Pouplier, M. (2010). Conditioning factors in external sandhi: an EPG study of vocalisation and retraction of
word-final English /l/. Journal of
Phonetics, 38(2), 240-259.
Iskarous, K., Pouplier, M., Marin, S. & Harrington, J. (2010). The
interaction between prosodic boundaries and accent in the production of
sibilants. Proceedings of the 5th
International Conference on Speech Prosody, Chicago, 100197:1-4.
Marin,
S. & Pouplier, M. (2010). Temporal organization
of complex onsets and codas in American English: Testing the predictions of a
gestural coupling model. Motor Control
14(3), 380-407.
Pouplier, M. (2011) The atoms of phonological
representations. Companion
to Phonology. Eds. Marc van Oostendorp, Keren Rice, Beth
Hume, Colin Ewen.
Pouplier, M., Hoole, Ph. & Scobbie,
J. (2011): Investigating the asymmetry of English sibilant
assimilation: acoustic and EPG data. Journal of Laboratory
Phonology 2(1), 1-33.
Pouplier, M. & Š. Beňuš (2011). On the phonetic status of syllabic consonants:
Evidence from Slovak. Journal of
Laboratory Phonology 2(2), 1-35.
Marin, S. (2011). Organization of complex onsets in Romanian. In: Y. Laprie & I. Steiner (Eds.). Proceedings of the
9th International Seminar on Speech Production, Montreal, June 20-23, 2011, 179-186.
Beňuš, Š. & Pouplier, M. (2011). Jaw movement in vowels and liquids forming the
syllable nucleus. Proceedings of Interspeech 2011
Hoole, Ph., Kühnert, B. & Pouplier, M.
(2012). System-related
variation in speech production. Handbook of Laboratory Phonology. Ed.s
Marie Huffman, Cécile Fougeron, Abigail Cohn. Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 115-130.
Marin, S. & L.
Goldstein. (2012). A gestural model of the temporal
organization of vowel clusters. Proceedings
of the Consonant Clusters and Structural Complexity Workshop, Munich, July 31 -
August 2, 2008.
Pouplier, M. (2012). The gestural approach to
syllable structure: Universal, language-, and cluster-specific aspects. In Fuchs, Weihrich, Pape,
Perrier (ed.s) Speech
Planning and Dynamics. Peter Lang.
Pouplier, M. (2012) The gaits of speech: re-examining the role of articulatory
effort in spoken language. In Maria-Josep
Solé, Daniel Recasens (ed.s). The
Initiation of Sound Change: Perception, Production, and Social Factors.
John Benjamins.
Marin, S. (2012). Romanian ‘blended’ vowels: A
production model of incomplete neutralization. Journal of Portuguese Linguistics, 11(2), 35-50.
Marin, S. & L. Goldstein
(2012). A gestural model of the temporal organization of vowel clusters. In Ph. Hoole, M. Pouplier. L. Bombien, Ch. Mooshammer, B. Kühnert (Eds.),
Consonant Clusters and Structural Complexity. Mouton de Gruyter (Interface Exploration Series), 177-204.
Philip Hoole,
Lasse Bombien, Marianne Pouplier, Christine Mooshammer,
Barbara Kühnert
(Eds). Consonant
Clusters and Structural Complexity. Mouton de Gruyter
(Interface Exploration Series), 2012
Marin, S. (2013). The
temporal organization of complex onsets and codas in Romanian: A gestural
approach. Journal of Phonetics, 41, 211-227.
Hoole, P., Pouplier, M., Beňuš,
Š. & Bombien, L. (2013). Articulatory
coordination in obstruent-sonorant clusters and
syllabic consonants: data and modelling. In L. Spreafico
& A. Vietti (eds.), Proceedings of Ratics3, Bolzano University Press.