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Advancements of phonetics in the 21st century: a critical appraisal of time and space in Articulatory Phonology. Journal of Phonetics, 95, 101195. Read pp. 1-4 and Appendix A

• didn’t finish appendix A

Summary

• Articulatory Phonology is a framework that attempts to answer two central questions at the basis of Linguistic Phonetics:
  1. For one, how do the planning and performance of language integrate into one skill of linguistic speech production?
  2. Secondly, how do the empirical generalizations regarding complex phonetic signals follow from the linguistic structuring of speech?
• language provides the speech motor control system with a set of spatial or temporal goals, which could be defined at various levels:
  • a constriction gesture
  • syllable structure
  • or prosodic boundaries
• Articulatory Phonology has evolved to have three major interconnected dynamical components which model speech as goal-seeking behavior at various levels:
  • (1) contrast dynamics, focusing on how linguistic contrasts within a word are identified with the temporal orchestration of spatial constriction goals, predicting in which way the actual production of words can be variable within and across languages, temporally and spatially
  • (2) prosodic dynamics, focusing on how a language’s syllabic, prominence, and grouping systems structure the timing of contrastive goals in word and phrase production
  • (3) planning dynamics, focusing on the temporal unfolding of utterance planning and feedback.

Task Dynamics

• concerns the question of how language structures temporal macro- and microscopic variation in constriction gestures at the levels of syllabic and phrasal prosodic strucutre

Tone systems and pitch gestures

• split-gesture dynamics
• FACTS model of speech motor control

1. Contrast and spatial goals
   • take tools that describe celestial orbits, electromagnetic waves and tissue morphogensis and apply them to the cognitive concept of phonological contrast
   • human brain’s inner structure and circuits are highly reflexctive of the structure of the world
     • working-memoery preforntal circuits can maintain events in their temporal order and spatially in a way that reflexcted their layout in space
     • place cells in the hippocampus that become active when an animal is in a particular location

if phonology is the computational link between the lexicon and phonetic form, then Markedness is the advocate of the phonetic interface, Faithfulness the agent of the lexical interface

Task Dynamics proposes that a word consists of several task variables, called gestures, most of them describing a constriction location or constriction degree goal for a particular vocal organ (e.g., tongue tip constriction location/degree or glottal aperture).