Cross-language effects of vowels on consonant onsets

Languages appear to differ in how much consonants coarticulate with vowels. Previously reported was an attempt to develop a metric of vowel effects on consonants so that quantitative comparisons of languages can be made. For each place of articulation in a given language, onset spectra are made of stop consonants before an /a/ vowel. Templates for each place of articulation are used to characterize these spectra. Then the templates for a language are tested against the other vowel contexts within that language. The extent to which the templates fail to generalize across vowels within each place of articulation is argued to reflect the degree of coarticulation in the language. An earlier study of Kana and Russian has been expanded to include English and Polish, so that four languages can be compared. As expected, the measure of template generalization (degree of coarticulation} varies across languages, though languages also differ in the behavior of individual consonants and vowels. Possible phonological motivations for such variation will be discussed. On the basis of the four languages analyzed, the advantages and limitations of using templates to construct a coarticulation metric will also be discussed. [Work supported by NSF.]