Pause postures in American English

Recent work examining articulation during pauses has found that articulatory patterns distinguish grammatical from ungrammatical pauses (Ramanarayanan et al. 2009). For Greek, Katsika et al. (2014) have identified pause postures (specific configurations of the vocal tract at prosodic boundaries) which are triggered by π-gestures with high activation levels and consequently occur at strong prosodic boundaries. This study investigates pause postures in American English, specifically, whether they occur, and how they are coordinated with other events at prosodic boundaries. In an electromagnetic articulometry (EMA) study, seven speakers produced 7-8 repetitions of 42 types of sentences varying in linguistic structure (stress, boundary, phrasing, and sentence type). Results from two speakers analyzed to date indicate that pause postures exist but that their presence might be speaker dependent. Analyses of gesture lags indicate a stable relationship between the boundary tone and pause posture, that the boundar...