Temporal relationships of the articulatory, acoustic, and perceptual effects of fricative–vowel coarticulation

Abstract

Anticipatory coarticulation has been extensively studied as part of the general phenomenon of coarticulation. However, the temporal relationships of the articulatory, acoustic, and perceptual effects of this particular type of coarticulation have not received much attention. The purpose of this study was to systematically examine lip protrusion gestures, acoustic and perceptual effects in fricative–vowel contexts, and explore the temporal relationships among these three effects. The onset of lip protrusion and acoustic effects as obtained and compared by employing a minimal contrast technique. The results showed that the onset of lip protrusion was much more consistent in a relative timeframe than in an absolute timeframe, and it was much earlier than, but independent of, the onset of traceable changes in formant frequencies. A reliable effect of anticipatory coarticulation on perception was also observed and the onset of this perceptual effect occurs tens of milliseconds later than the onset of the acoustic effect.