Consonant clusters require precise coordination of articulatory gestures, which may differ across languages. While both English and Korean permit /kw/ sequences in syllable-onset positions, only English allows complex onsets more broadly. This raises the question of whether phonetically similar consonant–glide sequences are coordinated similarly across languages or show language-specific timing patterns. This study examines the articulatory timing of English /kw/ by tracking gestural landmarks for velar constriction (/k/) and lip protrusion (/w/), relative to voicing onset (/ɪ/), using data from the SNU-MAC Corpus developed at the Seoul National University Multilingual Phonetics Lab https://snumac.wordpress.com. Productions of the English word quickly by eight Korean speakers and three English speakers were analyzed. Results show that Korean speakers’ articulatory timing systematically varies with their acoustic patterns. Those exhibiting English-like acoustic patterns (i.e., rising F2 trajectories) also demonstrate native-like articulatory timing, characterized by tightly sequenced tongue and lip gestures followed by voicing onset. In contrast, Korean speakers with Korean-like acoustics (i.e., high, flat F2 trajectories) display greater asynchrony between tongue and lip gestures, with lip release more closely aligned with voicing. These findings suggest that speakers coordinate phonetically similar sequences in language-specific ways, reflecting systematic cross-linguistic differences in articulatory timing.
Lee et al. (Wed,) studied this question.