Abstract

The central goal of this dissertation is to investigate the roles and interaction of articulatory, perceptual, and temporal elements in the phonological component of the grammar. This inquiry extends both to the input representations that are submitted to a phonological grammar, and to the constraints in the grammar. In order to adequately account for both production data and data from language typology, two elements must be integrated into the phonological component alongside articulatory gestures: perceptual features, which play an important role in determining phonotactic patterns, and gestural coordination, which establishes whether and how adjacent gestures are related to one another. This dissertation reports three experiments on the production of word-initial consonant clusters; such clusters are an appropriate environment for investigating how perception, articulation, and coordination interact in the phonology. The first experiment is an acoustic study of the production by native English speakers of Czech-possible consonant clusters (e.g. fkale, zbano, vnodi). Results show that speakers are more

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