Two phonological segments, one motor event : evidence for speech-motor disparity from English flap production

A pervasive assumption in speech motor behaviour is that units of speech production correspond to preplanned motor routines. In a possible counterexample, Browman and Goldstein [1] showed that, kinematically, a single glottal opening event can span two adjacent segments in s + stop clusters. However, because the segments are adjacent, it has not been clear whether this is a case of preplanned motor efficiency or simply a local concatenation of two separate motor events. Here we present an argument that in the English word 'Saturday', the two flaps may be generated as one articulatory gesture at the onset of the first (upward) flap, while the rhotic and the second (downward) flap occur automatically as a result of gravity and elasticity.