A gestural approach to the phonological representation of English diphthongs

A gestural approach is taken to resolve these controversies in that it allows for testing hypotheses about qualitative, phonological structure using continuous and articulatory data. For offgliding diphthongs, I test the hypotheses that they are composed of gestures independently available in the English inventory, and that glides are best represented as syllable coda. For ongliding diphthongs, the hypothesis that [ju] and [wV] exhibit asymmetrical temporal organization patterns is tested. ❧ Articulatory data were therefore collected with the rtMRI technique.

Results of comparing the articulatory correlates of offgliding diphthongs with their corresponding monophthongs in two clock-slowing contexts suggest that these diphthongs may be analyzed as composed of a pharyngeal constriction gesture that also produces the low vowel monophthong and a coda consonant gesture that is a post-vocalic variant of onglide. And the surface variation in articulation and acoustics results from the contexts they are embedded in.

On the other hand, examining the temporal organization of glides on the basis of Coupled Oscillator Model of Syllable structure showed that post-vocalic GC clusters exhibited timing patterns distinctive from CC; but pre-vocalic CG, including Cj, exhibited timing patterns similar to other onset clusters CC. For post-vocalic GC clusters, a unique structure is accordingly proposed in which offglide coordinates with the vowel like a coda consonant, but its spatio-temporal overlap with the vowel increases under the increase in coda complexity, thus yielding the “complex nucleus” effects.

This proposal is further supported by results from a simulation experiment. Results regarding the ongliding diphthongs suggest that prevocalic cluster Cj are structurally similar to Cw and other onset CC clusters in terms of temporal coordination. But as the asymmetries between Cj and Cw were left unaccounted for with the gestural approach, other mechanisms are required.