The generation of words in speech involves a number of processing stages. There is, first, a stage of conceptual preparation; this is followed by stages of lexical selection, phonological encoding, phonetic encoding and articulation. In addition, the speaker monitors the output and, if necessary, self-corrects. Major parts of the theory have been computer modelled. The paper concentrates on experimental reaction time evidence in support of the theory.

/pdf/a-theory-of-lexical-access-in-speech-production-56yj14t9eb.pdf

A theory of lexical access in speech production

An overview of the basic ideas of articulatory phonology is presented, along with selected examples of phonological patterning for which the approach seems to provide a particularly insightful account. In articulatory phonology, the basic units of phonological contrast are gestures, which are also abstract characterizations of articulatory events, each with an intrinsic time or duration. Utterances are modeled as organized patterns (constellations) of gestures, in which gestural units may overlap in time. The phonological structures defined in this way provide a set of articulatorily based natural classes. Moreover, the patterns of overlapping organization can be used to specify important aspects of the phonological structure of particular languages, and to account, in a coherent and general way, for a variety of different types of phonological variation. Such variation includes allophonic variation and fluent speech alternations, as well as ‘coarticulation’ and speech errors. Finally, it is suggested that the gestural approach clarifies our understanding of phonological development, by positing that prelinguistic units of action are harnessed into (gestural) phonological structures through differentiation and coordination.

https://www.haskins.yale.edu/sr/SR111/SR111_03.pdf

Articulatory phonology: an overview.

We have argued that dynamically defined articulatory gestures are the appropriate units to serve as the atoms of phonological representation. Gestures are a natural unit, not only because they involve task-oriented movements of the articulators, but because they arguably emerge as prelinguistic discrete units of action in infants. The use of gestures, rather than constellations of gestures as in Root nodes, as basic units of description makes it possible to characterise a variety of language patterns in which gestural organisation varies. Such patterns range from the misorderings of disordered speech through phonological rules involving gestural overlap and deletion to historical changes in which the overlap of gestures provides a crucial explanatory element.Gestures can participate in language patterns involving overlap because they are spatiotemporal in nature and therefore have internal duration. In addition, gestures differ from current theories of feature geometry by including the constriction degree as an inherent part of the gesture. Since the gestural constrictions occur in the vocal tract, which can be charactensed in terms of tube geometry, all the levels of the vocal tract will be constricted, leading to a constriction degree hierarchy. The values of the constriction degree at each higher level node in the hierarchy can be predicted on the basis of the percolation principles and tube geometry. In this way, the use of gestures as atoms can be reconciled with the use of Constriction degree at various levels in the vocal tract (or feature geometry) hierarchy.The phonological notation developed for the gestural approach might usefully be incorporated, in whole or in part, into other phonologies. Five components of the notation were discussed, all derived from the basic premise that gestures are the primitive phonological unit, organised into gestural scores. These components include (1) constriction degree as a subordinate of the articulator node and (2) stiffness (duration) as a subordinate of the articulator node. That is, both CD and duration are inherent to the gesture. The gestures are arranged in gestural scores using (3) articulatory tiers, with (4) the relevant geometry (articulatory, tube or feature) indicated to the left of the score and (5) structural information above the score, if desired. Association lines can also be used to indicate how the gestures are combined into phonological units. Thus, gestures can serve both as characterisations of articulatory movement data and as the atoms of phonological representation.

Articulatory gestures as phonological units

In this article, we attempt to reconcile the linguistic hypothesis that speech involves an underlying sequencing of abstract, discrete, context-independent units, with the empirical observation of continuous, context-dependent interleaving of articulatory movements. To this end, we first review a previously proposed task-dynamic model for the coordination and control of the speech articulators. We then describe an extension of this model in which invariant speech units (gestural primitives) are identified with context-independent sets of parameters in a dynamical system having two functionally distinct but interacting levels. The intergestural level is defined according to a set of activation coordinates; the interarticulator level is defined according to both model articulator and tractvariable coordinates. In the framework of this extended model, coproduction effects in speech are described in terms of the blending dynamics defined among a set of temporally overlapping active units; the relative timing ...

https://www.haskins.yale.edu/sr/SR099/SR099_03.pdf

A Dynamical Approach to Gestural Patterning in Speech Production

Variation and universals in VOT: evidence from 18 languages

Introduction We have recently begun a research program with the goal of providing explicit, formal representations of articulatory organization appropriate for use as phonological representations (Browman and Goldstein 1986; Goldstein and Browman 1986). The basic assumption underlying this research program is that much phonological organization arises from constraints imposed by physical systems. This is of course a common assumption with respect to the elements – features – used in phonological description; it is not such a common assumption, at least in recent years, with respect to the organization of phonological structures. In our view, phonological structure is an interaction of acoustic, articulatory, and other (e.g. psychological and/or purely linguistic) organizations. We are focusing on articulatory organization because we believe that the inherently multidimensional nature of articulation can explain a number of phonological phenomena, particularly those that involve overlapping articulatory gestures. Thus, we represent linguistic structures in terms of coordinated articulatory movements, called gestures , that are themselves organized into a gestural score that resembles an autosegmental representation. In order to provide an explicit and testable formulation of these structures, we are developing a computational model in conjunction with our colleagues Elliot Saltzman and Phil Rubin at Haskins Laboratories (Browman, Goldstein, Kelso, Rubin and Saltzman 1984; Browman, Goldstein, Saltzman, and Smith 1986). Figure 19.1 displays a schematic outline of this model, which generates speech from symbolic input. As can be seen from the number of submodels in the figure, gestures are relatively abstract. Even articulatory trajectories are one step more abstract than the output speech signal – they serve as input to the vocal tract model (Rubin, Baer, and Mermelstein 1981), which generates an acoustic signal.

Papers in Laboratory Phonology: Tiers in articulatory phonology, with some implications for casual speech

Two approaches to seeking stable patterns in the gestural organization of speech are examined: local organization (individual gestures coordinated with other individual gestures) and global organization (gestures forming larger conglomerates). Articulatory evidence from American English words with a variety of initial consonants and clusters shows that syllable-initial consonants form a global organization (indexed by a metric we term the C-center) that is coordinated with the syllable’s vowel gesture. For syllable-final consonants, however, the evidence suggests that a local organization is employed: The first postvocalic consonant gesture is coordinated with the vowel gesture. Implications of these different styles of organization for the perceptual and phonological structure of speech are discussed.

Some notes on syllable structure in articulatory phonology.

Gesture, Segment, Prosody: “Targetless” schwa: an articulatory analysis

Lexical organization and Welsh consonant mutations

Summary form only given. Articulatory phonology is an approach to phonetics and phonology which invokes dynamically defined articulatory gestures as the basic phonological units. Given such an approach, there is a regular and lawful, if complex, relationship between the physical signal and the linguistic units. That is, such gestures can simultaneously act as phonological units, conveying distinctiveness and participating in phonological alternations, and as characterizations of the physical behavior of the speech apparatus. Thus, the basic phonological unit, the gesture, is defined as the coordinated movement of a set of speech articulators that achieves some speech task, such as the bilabial closure associated with /b/. The movements of the gestures are characterized in terms of a critically damped mass-spring model

Dynamically defined gestures in an articulatory phonology

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