Two approaches to seeking stable patterns in the gestural organization of speech are examined: local organization (individual gestures coordinated with other individual gestures) and global organization (gestures forming larger conglomerates). Articulatory evidence from American English words with a variety of initial consonants and clusters shows that syllable-initial consonants form a global organization (indexed by a metric we term the C-center) that is coordinated with the syllable's vowel gesture. For syllable-final consonants, however, the evidence suggests that a local organization is employed: The first postvocalic consonant gesture is coordinated with the vowel gesture. Implications of these different styles of organization for the perceptual and phonological structure of speech are discussed.
Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 401 citations exist upstream.