The labial-coronal effect and CVCV stability during reiterant speech production: an acoustic analysis

This study investigates the stability of LC (Labial-Coronal) and CL (Coronal-Labial) CVCV sequences during a repetition task at an increasing rate. Despite variability between subjects and differences linked to the various consonant manners of articulation used in the study, the results show that the LC pattern is more stable than the CL pattern. Indeed, under the rate pressure, CL sequences often evolved to LC ones (e.g. /sapa/ switched to /pasa/) whereas the reverse pattern almost never happened. Coupled with previous studies about world languages, speech development and verbal transformation experiments, this is interpreted as a possible influence of the substance on phonological forms.