Articulatory stability of consonants in syllable nucleus versus syllable margin

Phonological structure shapes the relative timing and coordination of the articulatory movements within a syllable. While intergestural timing of consonants, both in clusters and relative to their vocalic syllable nucleus, is well established for English (e.g., Byrd 1996, Browman and Goldstein 2000, Nam et al. 2009, Byrd & Choi 2010), the kinematic properties of consonantal nuclei remain less understood. One study of Slovak investigated the articulatory coordination for syllabic liquids (Pouplier & Beňuš 2011), finding no distinctions in articulatory measurements of the liquid consonant when occupying nucleus versus onset/coda position. To further probe intrasyllable spatiotemporal organization of syllabic consonants, we conduct a study in English that manipulates the structural position of a consonant (e.g., nucleus versus onset [n]) while maintaining the segmental ordering with a preceding consonant (e.g., deepen versus deep not). We test whether the spatiotemporal stability of the consonantal constriction target differs as a function of structural position. We utilize the AI model SAM 2.0 (Ravi et al. 2024) to perform automated image segmentation on vocal tract rtMRI data of read speech. Further illumination of the kinematics of syllabic consonants in speech can serve to complement previous models that have specifically addressed consonant-vowel sequencing. [Work supported by NSF.]