Temporal Coordination of Articulatory Gestures in Nonnative Onset Clusters: Evidence From American English Speakers Using Electromagnetic Articulography

Purpose: Research in cross-language speech production indicates that, although the production of nonnative consonant clusters is often difficult, speakers of American English can produce some nonnative clusters (e.g.,/fn/) with high accuracy. This ease of production for select nonnative clusters may occur due to similarity of phonetic structure with native clusters (e.g., nonnative/fn/and native/sm/are both fricative-nasal sequences). The current study tested this hypothesis by examining the extent of transfer of articulatory coordi-nation from phonetically similar native onset clusters (i.e.,/fl/,/sm/) to nonnative/fn/clusters. Method: Using electromagnetic articulography, lip, tongue, and jaw movements were recorded in nine participants during the production of 22 nonwords (eight tokens per nonword) containing the native and nonnative clusters in different carrier phrases. We examined the temporal lags between each consonantal gesture in a cluster and the flanking vowel gesture, which were compared to the matched singleton conditions. Results: Analyses revealed that, as in native speech, when the syllable onset became more complex (i.e., CV ➔ CCV [C as consonant, V as vowel]), there was an increase in lag (less temporal overlap) between the leftmost consonantal gesture and the vocalic gesture, whereas there was a decrease in lag (more temporal overlap) between the rightmost consonant and the vocalic gesture (i.e., C-center timing). However, the segmental makeup of the cluster and type of carrier phrase used were also found to influence this change in temporal organization, raising new questions for future research. Conclusions: By and large, the findings are in agreement with the idea that the temporal coordination of articulator movements may be transferred from native clusters to phonetically similar nonnative clusters. However, kinematic measures of a broader range of nonnative clusters in different contexts are needed to fully explore this position.