COARTICULATION AND GESTURE OVERLAP BETWEEN SYLLABLES

This paper reports a preliminary investigation on the time course of intersyllabic coarticulation in Standard Chinese. In this investigation, around 3800 phonetically compact C1V1-C2V2 type disyllabic structures 3re employed to observe the acoustic effect of coarticulation in general, and about 400 disyllabic words are designed as the materials to examine: (1) How the articulators move from one syllable to the next？ (2) What is the extent to which the syllables overlapped？ And (3) In what sense, the syllables are produced in parallel; and in what sense, they are in sequence？ For the convenience of description, we just take the offset transition of V1 end the onset transition of C2 os the rough representations for anticipatory and carryover effect respectively, durational measurements are made correspondingly. To evaluate the possible influence on the behavior of gestural overlap from stress contrast and constituent difference of the syllables, analysis of variance are counducted as well. Based on this study, Some impressions about general nature of coarticulation behined the intersyllabic gesture overlapping in this language are discussed.