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      A replicable acoustic measure of lenition and the nature of variability in Gurindji stops

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          Abstract

          An automated method is presented for the commensurable, reproducible measurement of duration and lenition of segment types ranging from fully occluded stops to highly lenited variants, in acoustic data. The method is motivated with respect to the relationship between acoustic and articulatory phonetics and, through subsequent evaluation, is argued to correspond well to articulation. It is then applied to the phonemic stops of casual speech in Gurindji (Pama-Nyungan, Australia) to investigate the nature of their articulatory targets. The degree of stop lenition is found to vary widely. Contrary to expectations, no evidence is found of a positive effect on lenition due to word-medial (relative to word-initial) position, beyond that attributable to duration; nor do non-coronals lenite more than their apical counterparts, which freely lenite along a continuum towards taps. No significant effect is found of preceding or following vocalic environment. Taken together, the observed lenition, duration, and peak intensity velocities are argued to be inconsistent with a single, fully-occluded articulatory ‘stop’ target which is undershot at short durations, rather targets can be understood to span a range or ‘window’ of values in the sense of Keating ( 1990), from fully-occluded stop-like targets to more approximant-like targets. It is an open question to what degree the patterns found in Gurindji are language particular, or can be related to the organization of obstruent systems in Australian languages more broadly. Precisely comparable studies of additional languages will be especially valuable in addressing these questions and others, and are possible using the method we introduce.

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          Most cited references51

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          The coordination of arm movements: an experimentally confirmed mathematical model.

          This paper presents studies of the coordination of voluntary human arm movements. A mathematical model is formulated which is shown to predict both the qualitative features and the quantitative details observed experimentally in planar, multijoint arm movements. Coordination is modeled mathematically by defining an objective function, a measure of performance for any possible movement. The unique trajectory which yields the best performance is determined using dynamic optimization theory. In the work presented here, the objective function is the square of the magnitude of jerk (rate of change of acceleration) of the hand integrated over the entire movement. This is equivalent to assuming that a major goal of motor coordination is the production of the smoothest possible movement of the hand. Experimental observations of human subjects performing voluntary unconstrained movements in a horizontal plane are presented. They confirm the following predictions of the mathematical model: unconstrained point-to-point motions are approximately straight with bell-shaped tangential velocity profiles; curved motions (through an intermediate point or around an obstacle) have portions of low curvature joined by portions of high curvature; at points of high curvature, the tangential velocity is reduced; the durations of the low-curvature portions are approximately equal. The theoretical analysis is based solely on the kinematics of movement independent of the dynamics of the musculoskeletal system and is successful only when formulated in terms of the motion of the hand in extracorporal space. The implications with respect to movement organization are discussed.
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            Explaining Phonetic Variation: A Sketch of the H&H Theory

            B Lindblom (1990)
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              The Origin of Sound Patterns in Vocal Tract Constraints

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                Author and article information

                Contributors
                Journal
                1868-6354
                Laboratory Phonology: Journal of the Association for Laboratory Phonology
                Ubiquity Press
                1868-6354
                22 August 2017
                : 8
                : 1
                : 20
                Affiliations
                [-1]University of Queensland, St Lucia, QLD 4072, AU
                [-2]ARC Centre of Excellence for the Dynamics of Language, AU
                Author information
                http://orcid.org/0000-0003-4838-4122
                Article
                10.5334/labphon.18
                46bbe526-d961-47ec-abdc-26463a569f7d
                Copyright: © 2017 The Author(s)

                This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC-BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. See http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.

                History
                : 15 April 2016
                : 01 May 2017
                Categories
                Journal article

                Applied linguistics,General linguistics,Linguistics & Semiotics
                intensity,Lenition,stops,articulatory phonology,Australian languages,Gurindji,acoustic phonetics

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