Learnability of laryngeal abduction in voiceless fricatives : cross-linguistic evidence

Abstract

Previous research of laryngeal-oral gestural coordination in vowel-voiceless fricative sequences (Vf) shows that earlier timing of glottal opening relative to oral constriction is a languageindependent aerodynamic property. In this paper, we provide evidence that the extent of this gestural dissociation is nonetheless learnable in a varietyspecific way, and is, thus, actively controlled. This study shows that in some British English varieties, large temporal laryngeal-oral dissociation in Vf transitions is a correlate of the fricative /voice/ contrast, while the dissociation is much tighter in a language neutralising /voice/ such as Russian. The learnability of Vf-gestures is important in the context of theories on gestural phonology and acoustic multidimensionality of the /voice/ contrast.