Articulatory Conflict and Laryngeal Height

In cases of articulatory conflict, gestures involved in preserving phonemic distinctiveness are generally favored over gestures that do not. Here, an apparent exception to the phonemic distinctiveness preservation hypothesis is shown to in fact conform to it: in English, the larynx is lowered before voiced stops to maintain voicing distinctiveness, but the larynx is raised during high vowels, as a byproduct of pull from the tongue body. When a high vowel precedes a voiced consonant, the requirement of a lower larynx for consonant voicing should outweigh the higher larynx for the high vowel. However, available acoustic evidence runs counter to this prediction. New evidence from articulatory data of laryngeal movements is presented to show that laryngeal lowering, in fact, persists during vowels before voiced consonants even when the vowel is high. Thus the distinctiveness preservation hypothesis is supported.