Strength and Structure: Coupling Tones with Oral Constriction Gestures

According to the segmental anchor hypothesis within the Autosegmental-Metrical approach, tones are aligned with segmental boundaries of consonant and vowels in the acoustic domain. In prenuclear rising pitch accents (LH*), the rise is assumed to occur in the vicinity of the accented syllable it is phonologically associated with. However, there are differences in the alignment patterns within and across languages that cannot be captured within the AM approach. In the present study, we investigate the coordination of tonal and oral constriction gestures within Articulatory Phonology. Therefore, we model the coordination of prenuclear LH* pitch accents in Catalan, Northern and Southern German with respect to syllable production on the basis of recordings with a 2D electromagnetic articulography. We provide an extended coupled oscillators model that allows for balanced and imbalanced coupling strengths. Based on examples, we show that the observed differences in alignment patterns for prenuclear rising pitch accents can be modelled with the same underlying coordinative structures/coupling modes for vocalic and tonal gestures and that surface differences arise from gradient variation in coupling strengths.