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Structure in mind, structure in vocal tract
We update our understanding of the view that grammar regulates intersegmental temporal coordination and present an extension of that view to a new domain: we argue that inter-segmental coordination is basic to prosody. It is the glue joining segments together differently in different languages (here, illustrated with examples from Arabic and Spanish) and orchestrates their unfolding in ways corresponding to constructs posited in theoretical analysis. The correspondence is one between organization in mind-brain and organization in vocal tract. Moreover, for both mind-brain and vocal tract, the organization is phonological and abstract. It is so because it holds over segments of various identities: in Arabic, the first segment in /bka/ is not prosodified as part of the same unit as /ka/ and this holds true also for /blat/, /klat/ and so on, regardless of sonority. In contrast, in English or Spanish, a different organization holds. Crucially, uniformity in organization (same organization presiding over sequences with varying segmental makeup) does not imply uniqueness of phonetic exponents: prosodic organization is pleiotropic, simultaneously expressed by more than one phonetic exponent. Finally, two properties of coordination relations are underscored: lawful flexibility and abstractness. The first is revealed in the degrees of freedom with which movements corresponding to any given effector begin; the second in invariances of task-relevant kinematic signatures regardless of the effectors implicated in any given segmental sequence. Once again, abstract phonological structure is mirrored in vocal tracts via coordination relations holding across physiology and the particular modes of its operation
Stochastic Time Models of Syllable Structure
<div><p>Drawing on phonology research within the generative linguistics tradition, stochastic methods, and notions from complex systems, we develop a modelling paradigm linking phonological structure, expressed in terms of syllables, to speech movement data acquired with 3D electromagnetic articulography and X-ray microbeam methods. The essential variable in the models is syllable structure. When mapped to discrete coordination topologies, syllabic organization imposes systematic patterns of variability on the temporal dynamics of speech articulation. We simulated these dynamics under different syllabic parses and evaluated simulations against experimental data from Arabic and English, two languages claimed to parse similar strings of segments into different syllabic structures. Model simulations replicated several key experimental results, including the fallibility of past phonetic heuristics for syllable structure, and exposed the range of conditions under which such heuristics remain valid. More importantly, the modelling approach consistently diagnosed syllable structure proving resilient to multiple sources of variability in experimental data including measurement variability, speaker variability, and contextual variability. Prospects for extensions of our modelling paradigm to acoustic data are also discussed.</p></div