Some temporal rules in speech production.

A central preoccupation of theorists since the beginning of the modern explosion in speech production research has been formulating the underlying rules which allow speakers to concatenate message units and overall temporal properties of utterances (Ohman, 1966, 1967; Lindblom, 1963). We argue that, in general, when stress and speaking rate was varied, relational invariance is preserved over substantial changes in the absolute duration of articulatory events, and that rules which preserve temporal structure can be used to describe coarticulatory changes. [This work was supported by NIH Grant NS-13870 to Haskins Laboratories.] [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]