ABSTRACT
Abstract
Liberman and Mattingly (1985) stated that "gestures . . . have characteristic invariant properties ... as the more remote structures that control the [peripheral] movements" (p. 23). In this chapter, we show that such gestures not only can characterize the movements of the speech articulators, but also can act as phonological primitives.
Gestures can serve to distinguish lexical items, by their presence or absence in a lexical entry, by differences among their individual attributes, and by the amount of overlap among different gestures in a lexical item, which can vary from complete through partial to minimal. Given this description of a lexical item, the development of a number of phonological alternations and sound changes can be seen as resulting from variability normally occurring during the act of talking—reductions in magnitude of the gestures and increase in the overlap of gestures. Additional cases of historical change, both assimilatory and dissimilatory, can be analyzed as a reassignment of gestural attributes in cases where two gestures overlap. Such reassignment is, in effect, a failure of the listener's normal ability to correctly identify which of two overlapping gestures is the source of some aspect of the acoustic signal.
