Can locus equations model dialect-specific variation in coarticulation?
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.36505/ExLing-2021/12/0017/000490Keywords:
acoustic phonetics, locus equations, coarticulation, dialect, ItalianAbstract
Cross-linguistic coarticulatory differences are experimentally challenging to disentangle. This paper aims to assess whether traditional locus equations constitute a suitable heuristic tool to highlight regional differences in coarticulation patterns. For this purpose, three highly similar dialects were chosen, i.e., Bari, Cagliari, and Palermo Italian. C-V effects were examined in CV and VC sequences (V = /a/; C = /p, t, k, f, s, m, n/). A two-step acoustic analysis was performed on 648 phonetically controlled utterances, read by 24 speakers, and sampled from the CLIPS corpus. Subsequently, traditional locus equations and alternative linear regressions were compared. The results show that locus equations do not adequately model variation of subtle dynamic patterns. Yet significant dialect-specific differences in coarticulation emerged fitting alternative linear regressions.
References
Bang, H.-Y. (2017). The acoustic counterpart to coarticulation resistance and aggressiveness in locus equation metrics and vowel dispersion. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 141(4), EL345-EL350.
Carignan, C., Hoole, P., Kunay, E., Pouplier, M., Joseph, A., Voit, D., Frahm, J., & Harrington, J. (2020). Analyzing speech in both time and space. Laboratory Phonology, 11(1:2), 1-26.
Hardcastle, W. J., & Hewlett, N. (Eds.). (1999). Coarticulation: Theory, Data and Techniques. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Öhman, S. (1966). Coarticulation in VCV utterances: Spectrographic measurements. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 39(1), 151-168.
Perillo, S., Bang, H.-Y., & Clayards, M. (2015). Locus equation metrics as an index of coarticulation resistance: The effect of prosodic prominence. Proceedings of Meetings on Acoustics, 25.
Downloads
Published
Issue
Section
License
Articles are published under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are properly credited.
