The influence of coarticulatory and phonemic relations on individual compensatory formant production

Previous auditory perturbation studies have shown that speakers are able to simultaneously use multiple compensatory strategies to produce a certain acoustic target. In the case of formant perturbation, these findings were obtained examining the compensatory production for low vowels /ɛ/ and /æ/. This raises some controversy as more recent research suggests that the contribution of the somatosensory feedback to the production of vowels might differ across phonemes. In particular, the compensatory magnitude to auditory perturbations is expected to be weaker for high vowels compared to low vowels since the former are characterized by larger linguopalatal contact. To investigate this hypothesis, this paper conducted a bidirectional auditory perturbation study in which F2 of the high central vowel /ɨ/ was perturbed in opposing directions depending on the preceding consonant (alveolar vs velar). The consonants were chosen such that speakers' usual coarticulatory patterns were either compatible or incompatible with the required compensatory strategy. The results demonstrate that speakers were able to compensate for applied perturbations even if speakers' compensatory movements resulted in unusual coarticulatory configurations. However, the results also suggest that individual compensatory patterns were influenced by additional perceptual factors attributable to the phonemic space surrounding the target vowel /ɨ/.