The Labial-Coronal effect and CVCV stability during reiterant speech production: An ARTICULATORY analysis

Amélie Rochet-Capellan (1) , Jean-Luc Schwartz (1)

1 ICP - Institut de la communication parlée

In a companion paper [1], we showed that CVCV utterances with a labial consonant followed by a coronal one (LC sequences) are more stable than reverse CL sequences in speeded reiterant speech. We proposed that this could explain why human languages select LC sequences more often than CL ones (the “LC effect”). We provide here articulatory data explaining where the greater LC stability could come from, by investigating inter-articulator coordination during LC and CL utterances at an increasing rate. Rate increase leads variegated CVCV (e.g. /pata/) to be produced in a single jaw cycle but this is not the case for duplicated CVCV (e.g. /papa/. Furthermore, LC and CL sequences both evolve towards the same cycle with a progressive phasing of lips and tongue close together in the jaw cycle. Taken together, these results provide new elements to argue for motor control constraints shaping phonological patterns from economy principles.

Domains: Linguistics; Psychology

Amélie Rochet-Capellan, Jean-Luc Schwartz. The Labial-Coronal effect and CVCV stability during reiterant speech production: An ARTICULATORY analysis. 9th International Conference on Speech Communication and Technology (InterSpeech 2005), Sep 2005, Lisbonne, Portugal. pp.1013-1016. ⟨hal-00157989⟩