Coarticulation in Young Children: F2 Locus Equation as a Metric

Abstract

Speech rarely involves production of one sound in isolation, but rather is a continuous, dynamic sequencing of vocal tract movements produced in rapid succession. Though it might be convenient to consider phonemes as independent, invariant units that are simply linked together to produce speech, this simplistic approach does not really fit the facts. When sounds are put together to form syllables, words, phrases, and sentences, they interact in complex ways and sometimes appear to lose their separate identity. The influence that sounds exert on one another is called coarticulation, which means that the articulation of any one sound is influenced by a preceding or following sound. For any given target sound, the phoneme immediately preceding and the one immediately following will influence the articulatory posture of the vocal tract. We make articulatory adjustments to both phonemes at the same time and in fact we are articulating more than one phoneme at one time. This phenomenon of simultaneously articulating more than one phoneme is called coarticulation.