Consonant-vowel coarticulation patterns in Swedish and Mandarin

This paper reports a cross linguistic study that compares the coarticulation patterns between consonant and vowel (CV) in Mandarin Chinese and Southern Swedish. Kinematic data were collected using the Electromagnetic Articulography (EMA) for both languages and were subjected to three types of CV time lag measurement, based on more or less equivalent landmarks on lips and tongue, and partially adopted in previous studies [1, 2, 3]. We found rather consistent CV coordination patterns in these two typologically different languages with both the velocity-based and the acceleration-based measurements on the lips and the tongue body. The most striking result to emerge from the data is the same effect of gender on the variation of CV coarticulation in both languages, which has not been reported previously. In addition, only when gender was added as a factor, did we find the language differences on the CV time lags.