Temporal coordination of articulator gestures: an example from Greenlandic.

Movement data are analyzed to elucidate principles of articulator coordination. Procedures for tracking articulator gestures from x-ray motion films, and results obtained from Swedish and Bulgarian work are reported in Wood [J. Phon. 19, 281–292 (1991), Proc. 3rd Congress I.C.P.L.A., 191-200, Helsinki (1994), Proc. 13th I.C.Ph.Sc., Vol. 1, 392–395, Stockholm (1995), J. Phon. (in press)]. Coarticulation and gesture conflict have been studied. The domain of coarticulation has been seen variously as a between-target transition, or comprising of one or two phonemes on either side. These are usually presented as rival solutions, but the present data show speakers using all three schemes. The pertinent question is how does a speaker select one of them. For gesture conflict, there are two approaches. The one feeds all gestures to the musculature where conflicts are resolved by summing rival forces. The second modifies motor input by queuing antagonistic gestures in order to avoid conflicts. All potential gesture conflicts in the present data were resolved by queuing gestures. The data to be reported here include Eskimo to provide a further test on the universality of these principles for articulator coordination. [Work supported by Swedish Research Council for Humanities and Social Sciences.] Poster presentation