Phonotactics and Articulatory Coordination Interact in Phonology: Evidence from Nonnative Production

Lisa Davidson
2006 Cognitive Science  
A core area of phonology is the study of phonotactics, or how sounds are linearly combined. Recent crosslinguistic analyses have shown that the phonology determines not only phonotactics, but also the articulatory coordination or timing of adjacent sounds. This paper explores how the relationship between coordination and phonotactics affects speakers producing non-native sequences. Recent experimental results (Davidson 2005 (Davidson , 2006 have shown that English speakers often repair
more » ... d word-initial sequences (e.g. /zg/, /vz/) by producing the consonants with a less overlapping coordination. A theoretical account of the experimental results employs Gafos's (2002) constraint-based grammar of coordination. In addition to Gafos's ALIGNMENT constraints establishing temporal relationships between consonants, a family of RELEASE constraints is proposed to encode phonotactic restrictions. The interaction of ALIGNMENT and RELEASE constraints accounts for why speakers produce non-native sequences by failing to adequately overlap the articulation of the consonants. The Optimality Theoretic analysis also incorporates floating constraints to explain why speakers are not equally accurate on all unattested clusters.
doi:10.1207/s15516709cog0000_73 pmid:21702839 fatcat:dcztworrlrbdfex4fcygil5lui