Selection and coordination of articulatory gestures in temporally constrained production

A variety of factors such as articulatory context, prosodic structure, and rate of articulation are known to induce compression or expansion of articulatory movements and their relative timing. Another potentially important factor is the amount of time available for planning and executing a movement. The current study employs a novel cued insertion task which controls the amount of time available for planning a single articulatory movement produced in the context of others. The study tests the hypothesis that movements associated with onset consonants and coda consonants will respond differently to temporal constraints on planning, due to differences in how they are controlled. It is observed that compression of movement timing is greater in onset consonantal gestures than in coda consonantal gestures. These findings are argued to support a split-control model, in which onset consonants are co-selected and coordinated with vowels, while coda consonants are competitively selected but not coordinated with vowels.