Factors influencing phoneme articulation time (Soberanes et al., 2025)

<p dir="ltr"><b>Purpose:</b> This study aimed to identify how a set of predefined factors modulates phoneme articulation time within a speaker.</p><p dir="ltr"><b>Method: </b>We used a custom in-lab system that records lip muscle activity through electromyography signals, aligned with the produced speech, to measure phoneme articulation time. Twenty Spanish-speaking participants (12 females) were evaluated while producing sequences of a consonant–vowel syllable, with each sequence consisting of repeated articulations of either /pa/ or /pu/. Before starting the sequences, participants underwent a priming step with either a fast or slow speech rate. Additionally, the general attentional state level was assessed at the beginning, middle, and end of the protocol. To analyze the variability in the duration of /p/ and vowel articulation, we fitted individual linear mixed-models considering three factors: general attentional state level, priming rate, and coarticulation effects (for /p/, i.e., followed by /a/ or /u/) or phoneme identity (for vowels, i.e., being /a/ or /u/).</p><p dir="ltr"><b>Results: </b>We found that the level of general attentional state positively correlated with production time for both the consonant /p/ and the vowels. Additionally, /p/ production was influenced by the nature of the following vowel (i.e., coarticulation effects), while vowel production time was affected by the primed speech rate.</p><p dir="ltr"><b>Conclusions: </b>Phoneme duration appears to be influenced by both stable, speaker-specific characteristics (idiosyncratic traits) and internal, state-dependent factors related to the speaker’s condition at the time of speech production. While some factors affect both consonants and vowels, others specifically modify only one of these types.</p><p dir="ltr"><b>Supplemental Material S1. </b>Insights into the effect of general attentional state, coarticulation and primed speech rate in phoneme production time.</p><p dir="ltr">Soberanes, M., Pérez-Ramírez, C. A., & Assaneo, M. F. (2025). Insights into the effect of general attentional state, coarticulation, and primed speech rate in phoneme production time. <i>Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research</i><i>, </i><i>68</i>(4), 1773–1783. <a href="https://doi.org/10.1044/2025_JSLHR‐24‐00595" rel="noreferrer" target="_blank">https://doi.org/10.1044/2025_JSLHR‐24‐00595</a></p>