1988/03/01 by Catherine P. Browman, Louis Goldstein · 6 citations
Psychology · Social Sciences · #Categorization, perception, and language #Linguistic Variation and Morphology #Phonetics and Phonology Research
paper · doi:10.1159/000261823
crossref issued 1988/03/01 · crossref published 1988/03/01 · crossref published-print 1988/03/01 · openalex publication_date 1988/03/01 · crossref published-online 2009/11/19 · crossref created 2009/11/24 · crossref deposited 2021/06/23 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/31 · crossref indexed 2026/07/31
Two approaches to seeking stable patterns in the gestural organization of speech are examined: local organization (individual gestures coordinated with other individual gestures) and global organization (gestures forming larger conglomerates). Articulatory evidence from American English words with a variety of initial consonants and clusters shows that syllable-initial consonants form a global organization (indexed by a metric we term the C-center) that is coordinated with the syllable's vowel gesture. For syllable-final consonants, however, the evidence suggests that a local organization is employed: The first postvocalic consonant gesture is coordinated with the vowel gesture. Implications of these different styles of organization for the perceptual and phonological structure of speech are discussed.