Word-initial consonant-vowel coordination in a lexical pitch-accent language

Area of Science:

• Phonetics
• Articulatory Phonology
• Speech Production

Background:

• Prosody influences speech articulation, but the role of tones is understudied.
• Previous research on tonal integration in CV sequences used small datasets and lacked consensus on measurement.

Purpose of the Study:

• Investigate Swedish word accents' effects on consonant-vowel (CV) coarticulation.
• Revisit evidence for tonal integration in speech production.

Main Methods:

• Used Electromagnetic Articulography (EMA) and acoustic data.
• Analyzed 13 measures of bilabial and tongue body movements for the /ma/ sequence in 19 speakers.
• Employed mixed effects regression models to analyze data from a lexical pitch-accent language (Swedish).

Main Results:

• Identified longer tongue body movement in the rising tone context.
• Observed significant differences in lip movements and CV onset time lag between rising and falling tones.
• Results indicate potential biomechanical influences on speech articulation due to physiological connections.

Conclusions:

• Swedish word accents induce subtle articulatory differences, potentially biomechanically driven.
• CV onset timing may vary based on measurement landmarks, impacting conclusions on tonal integration.
• Further cross-linguistic research with larger speaker samples is needed to clarify tonal integration in CV coarticulation.