Relations between acoustic and articulatory measurements of /l/

Variation in the production of English /l/ has received significant study. It has been characterized in terms of categorical allophones, in terms of acoustic properties, and in terms of articulatory timing. Using a parallel corpus of acoustic-articulatory data from two speakers of American English, this study looks at the relations between acoustic and articulatory measurements of /l/ across words in corpus of read speech. We find significant negative correlations between F1 and tongue tip height and significant positive correlations between F2 and tongue body retraction. Additionally, we find that the relative timing of tongue tip and tongue back gestures in our data are consistent with past work on positional variants of /l/.