Coarticulation in its general sense refers to a situation in which a conceptually isolated speech sound is influenced by, and becomes more like, a preceding or following speech sound. There are two types of coarticulation: ''anticipatory coarticulation,'' when a feature or characteristic of a speech sound is anticipated (assumed) during the production of a preceding speech sound; and ''carryover'' or ''perseverative coarticulation,'' when the effects of a sound are seen during the production of sound(s) that follow. Many models have been developed to account for coarticulation. They include the look-ahead, articulatory syllable, time-locked, window, coproduction and articulatory phonology models.
Coarticulation in phonetics refers to two different phenomena:
*the
assimilation of the
place of articulation
In articulatory phonetics, the place of articulation (also point of articulation) of a consonant is an approximate location along the vocal tract where its production occurs. It is a point where a constriction is made between an active and a pa ...
of one
speech sound
In phonetics (a branch of linguistics), a phone is any distinct speech sound. It is any surface-level or unanalyzed sound of a language, the smallest identifiable unit occurring inside a stream of speech. In spoken human language, a phone is thus ...
to that of an adjacent speech sound. For example, while the sound of
English normally has an
alveolar place of articulation, in the word ''tenth'' it is pronounced with a
dental place of articulation because the following sound, , is dental.
*the production of a
co-articulated consonant, that is, a consonant with two simultaneous places of articulation. An example of such a sound is the
voiceless labial-velar plosive found in many
West Africa
West Africa, also known as Western Africa, is the westernmost region of Africa. The United Nations geoscheme for Africa#Western Africa, United Nations defines Western Africa as the 16 countries of Benin, Burkina Faso, Cape Verde, The Gambia, Gha ...
n languages.
The term coarticulation may also refer to the transition from one articulatory
gesture
A gesture is a form of nonverbal communication or non-vocal communication in which visible bodily actions communicate particular messages, either in place of, or in conjunction with, speech. Gestures include movement of the hands, face, or othe ...
to another.
References
*Crowley, Terry. (1997) ''An Introduction to Historical Linguistics.'' 3rd edition. Oxford University Press.
Phonetics
Assimilation (linguistics)
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