ABSTRACT

Section 2 begins with a review of the basic phonetic facts of V -to-V coarticulation. Articulatory and acoustic evidence show that in vev sequences there is a smooth transition from the articulation of the first vowel to that of the second. The gesture of the consonant is superimposed at some point during this vocalic transition. The physiological basis of Vto-V coarticulation rests crucially on the notion of articulatory overlap (also known as co-production) between consonantal and vocalic gestures. In section 3, I give further evidence for this overlap, showing that the vowel is the articulatory foundation of the syllable, in the sense that vowel articulations extend throughout the syllable, overlapping with surrounding consonants. This makes vowel gestures contiguous in successive syllables, a phenomenon which I will call V-to-V contiguity. Consonant gestures, on

the other hand, do not share the property of contiguity but are rather interrupted by intervening vocalic gestures. This provides us with a fundamental asymmetry between vocalic and consonantal gestures: V -to-V contiguity in a VCV sequence, but no C-to-C contiguity in a CVC sequence. This asymmetry is related to a basic physiological distinction between vowels and consonants, namely, the absence versus the presence of a constriction in the mid-sagittal plane.