Prosodic Boundary Effects on Segment Articulation and V-to-V Coarticulation in Standard Chinese

This paper investigates the prosodic conditioning of the segment production and vowel-to-vowel coarticulation in the Standard Chinese through electropalatographic and acoustic analysis. The articulatory and acoustic measures were obtained for un-aspirated alveolar consonant /t/ and vowels /i/ and /a/. Results show that the domain-initial consonant is strengthened in a hierarchical manner in higher prosodic domains. The vocalic gesture after the strengthened consonant tends to be reduced, and the domain-final vocalic gesture shows more linguapalatal contact and longer duration. The vocalic anticipatory effect is shown to appear up to intermediate phrase boundary, but is constrained by the articulatory constraint for vocalic gesture. The vocalic carryover effect is likely constrained by foot domain.