Dynamically defined gestures in an articulatory phonology

Summary form only given. Articulatory phonology is an approach to phonetics and phonology which invokes dynamically defined articulatory gestures as the basic phonological units. Given such an approach, there is a regular and lawful, if complex, relationship between the physical signal and the linguistic units. That is, such gestures can simultaneously act as phonological units, conveying distinctiveness and participating in phonological alternations, and as characterizations of the physical behavior of the speech apparatus. Thus, the basic phonological unit, the gesture, is defined as the coordinated movement of a set of speech articulators that achieves some speech task, such as the bilabial closure associated with /b/. The movements of the gestures are characterized in terms of a critically damped mass-spring model