Articulatory phonology

Articulatory phonology is a linguistic theory originally proposed in 1986 by Catherine Browman of Haskins Laboratories and Louis Goldstein of Yale University and Haskins. The theory identifies theoretical discrepancies between phonetics and phonology and aims to unify the two by treating them as low and high dimensional descriptions of a single system.

Unification can be achieved by incorporating into a single model the idea that the physical system (identified with phonetics) constrains the underlying abstract system (identified with phonology), making the units of control at the abstract planning level the same as those at the physical level.

The plan of an utterance is formatted as a gestural score, which provides the input to a physically based model of speech production - the task dynamic model of Elliot Saltzman. The gestural score graphs locations within the vocal tract where constriction can occur, indicating the planned or target degree of constriction. A computational model of speech production developed at Haskins Laboratories combines articulatory phonology, task dynamics, and the Haskins articulatory synthesis system developed by Philip Rubin and colleagues.

In articulatory phonology, the basic units of phonological contrast are gestures, which are also abstract characterizations of articulatory events, each with an intrinsic time or duration. Utterances are modeled as organized patterns (constellations) of gestures, in which gestural units may overlap in time. The phonological structures defined in this way provide a set of articulatorily based natural classes. Moreover, the patterns of overlapping organization can be used to specify important aspects of the phonological structure of particular languages, and to account, in a coherent and general way, for a variety of different types of phonological variation. Such variation includes allophonic variation and fluent speech alternations, as well as 'coarticulation' and speech errors. Browman and Goldstein have suggested that the gestural approach clarifies our understanding of phonological development, by positing that prelinguistic units of action are harnessed into (gestural) phonological structures through differentiation and coordination.