An articulatory investigation of lingual coarticulatory resistance and aggressiveness for consonants and vowels in Catalan.

Lingual movement data for Catalan vowel-consonant-vowel sequences reveal differences in contextual coarticulatory variability in tongue position at the middle of the consonant for p>/n/>dark/l/>/s/>> and at vowel midpoint for /u/>/a/>/i/. The velar stop /k/ exhibits a high degree of contextual variability in the horizontal dimension but not in the vertical dimension. These differences in coarticulatory sensitivity are attributed to differences in articulatory constraint, e.g., palatality and frication cause a higher degree of resistance in the consonant than laterality. A higher degree of contextual variability for dark /l/ than expected appears to be associated with speaker-dependent differences in darkness degree. Contextual variability is greater at regions not involved in closure or constriction formation, e.g., at the tongue dorsum than at the tongue front for alveolars. Coarticulatory resistance and coarticulatory aggressiveness are positively correlated: Phonetic segments, which are especially resistant to coarticulatory effects from the adjacent segments, exert maximal coarticulation on them. Consequently, highly constrained segments such as alveolopalatal consonants turn out to affect tongue position for less constrained segments such as back vowels rather than vice versa.