Sequences and segments: phonemic status and gestural timing in English

With the advent of theories like Articulatory Phonology (e.g. Browman and Goldstein 1992), it is increasingly popular to assume that the set of phonological primitives includes not only events (either acoustic or articulatory), but also the timing relations between these events. If the timing relationship between events can be specified in the lexicon, however, then this provides one more way in which languages can differ arbitrarily from each other. As counterintuitive as this might be, there does seem to be some empirical support for it. To pick just one example, work by Smith (1993) on the timing relations between consonants and vowels in Italian and Japanese shows that in fact languages may differ in whether vowels are anchored to consonants or to other vowels. This seems like an alarming amount of detailed, language-specific variation to allow – especially if we consider that these relations must be learned somehow. How much articulatory detail do children need to learn explicitly in order to acquire their languages? Why would children bother to learn such minute details at all, when we might have thought a priori that these could perfectly well be filled in by some universal default mechanism for concatenating speech segments? Byrd (1994) suggests a possible explanation for some low-level timing differences between languages. She points out that consistent timing relations could be a reflex of “segmenthood” in the language (p.154). If this is true, then perhaps children could learn segmenthood through regular distributional means, and the articulatory differences between languages merely reflect the differences between implementing a segment and implementing a sequence. As an example, Byrd considers a velar stop gesture and a labial stop gesture, which could be combined to create a single phonological segment