Limits on gestural reorganization following vowel deletion: The case of Tokyo Japanese

The coordination of gestures in consonant clusters differs across languages and hence must be a learned aspect linguistic knowledge. Precisely pinning down the relation used particular language, or for cluster type, has been facilitated by recent research showing that relations structure kinematic variation unique ways. We apply these methods to hitherto under-explored topic, created via vowel deletion. Our case study involves fricative-fricative fricative-stop resulting from variable deletion devoiced vowels Tokyo Japanese. Examination articulatory data obtained Electromagnetic Articulography (EMA) show some clusters, i.e., gestural reorganization whereas other types, sequences, behave as if remains place, despite fact tongue dorsum movement is absent record. discuss several theoretical possibilities account differential effects on re-organization environments.