Articulatory Strategies for Place Contrasts of Unreleased Final Stops on Preceding Vowels: Evidence from Ultrasound Imaging

This ultrasound study examines the gestural coordination involved in vowel-to-consonant sequences concerning unreleased final stops, which are more susceptible to reduction than their released counterparts. Thus, coarticulatory information on preceding vowel is important signal place contrasts of post-vocalic stops. The vowel-consonant monosyllabic words Cantonese represents a testing case for having preserved phonemic six stops range contexts. Preliminary results from smoothing spline ANOVA and linear mixed-effect regression show that patterns depend height, is, non-high vowels undergoing gradual coarticulation whereas high phonologising lingual properties vowels.