ABSTRACT
A continuing challenge to our understanding of speech production and perception is the fact that utterances with markedly different acoustic, kinematic, and electromyographic characteristics can nevertheless be perceived as the “same” word. In this chapter, we first discuss the importance of examining articulation relative to an intrinsic, activity-defined metric, and show how such an analysis of intervocalic consonant timing across different speaking rates and stress patterns significantly reduces both interspeaker and intraspeaker variability. Next, we explore whether the observed relative temporal stability can be achieved without reference to an extrinsic clocking device, but rather in terms of the dynamic topology of the system's behavior. To this end, using a phase plane description of articulatory motion, we show how the temporal analysis originally offered can be redescribed in terms of critical positionvelocity states (or, in polar coordinates, phase angles) for interarticulator cooperation. Such coordination, we propose, can be captured in terms of events that are intrinsic to the system's dynamics, not in terms of conventional durational metrics.
