| Abstract | Much attention has been given to the acoustic and physiological means by which the /bdg/-/ptk/ distinction in English is signaled. The most important articulatory difference has been found to involve the nature and timing of laryngeal action associated with the stop articulation. For the labial stops /b/ and /p/ at least three, and possibly four, phonetic classes must be recognized, but we cannot assume that these make up the complete inventory of the ways in which American English speakers coordinate lip and larynx maneuvers in producing these phonemes. Acoustic and physiological data obtained from one American English speaker who produced utterances containing /b/ and /p/ in a variety of contexts showed at least five patterns of lip-larynx coordination, i.e., a degree of phonetic versatility usually encountered in studies comparing different speakers across different languages. |
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