Tonal coarticulation in Yoruba: Locus equation analysis

This study examines the acoustic coarticulatory effects of tone on VCV sequences of Yoruba, when each vowel of the VCV sequences bears a different tone. The first aim is to understand how the presence of tone affects CV coarticulation in the traditional locus equations parlance as used by Krull (1987). This marks the first application of the locus equation metric to a tonal language in the study of CV coarticulation. The second aim is to determine how the stop consonant in VCV sequences is affected by prosodic overlay, independently of the vowels altered location in articulatory/acoustic space. In order to achieve the second objective, the modified locus equation regression metric that was used by [Lindblom et al. J. Acoust. Soc. Am. (2007)] to dissociate vowel context effects from rate-induced effects on consonantal F2 onsets are applied. Similar to the findings of Lindblom et al. (2007), the analyses document separate effect for F2 locus relative to F2 nucleus.