Strength and structure: Coupling tones with oral constriction gestures Doris Mücke 1 , Anne Hermes 1,2 , Sam Tilsen 3 1 IfL-Phonetics, University of Cologne, Germany 2 Laboratoire de Phonétique et Phonologie, UMR 7018, CNRS/Sorbonne-Nouvelle, France 3 Cornell University, Ithaca, United States  Abstract According to the segmental anchor hypothesis within the Autosegmental-Metrical approach, tones are aligned with segmental boundaries of consonant and vowels in the acoustic domain. In prenuclear rising pitch accents (LH*), the rise is assumed to occur in the vicinity of the accented syllable it is phonologically associated with. However, there are differences in the alignment patterns within and across languages that cannot be captured within the AM approach. In the present study, we investigate the coordination of tonal and oral constriction gestures within Articulatory Phonology. Therefore, we model the coordination of prenuclear LH* pitch accents in Catalan, Northern and Southern German with respect to syllable production on the basis of recordings with a 2D electromagnetic articulography. We provide an extended coupled oscillators model that allows for balanced and imbalanced coupling strengths. Based on examples, we show that the observed differences in alignment patterns for prenuclear rising pitch accents can be modelled with the same underlying coordinative structures/coupling modes for vocalic and tonal gestures and that surface differences arise from gradient variation in coupling strengths. Index Terms: dynamical systems, tonal alignment, tonal gestures, oral constriction gestures, computational model of variability, imbalanced coupling 1. Introduction 1.1. Tonal alignment in the AM approach Within the Autosegmental-Metrical (AM) approach, tones are associated with tone-bearing units of the textual string, such as stressed syllables in German pitch accents. The tonal alignment research extended this concept by developing the segmental anchoring hypothesis, measuring patterns of co- occurrences of pitch movements with boundaries of the segmental string in the acoustic dimension [1-6]. Segmental anchoring and the related measures of co-occurring events in the tonal and segmental string are not meant to be a direct reflex of the phonological categorization: Tonal association is categorical and low-dimensional (phonological representation), while tonal alignment is continuous and high- dimensional (phonetic representation). Figure 1 provides an example for the alignment continuum of prenuclear rising pitch accents (LH*) measured on the acoustic surface for Northern German, Southern German (Viennese) and Catalan, adapted from [6,7]. The figure provides the respective acoustic alignment patterns for L and H* in terms of F0 turning points relative to segmental boundaries in the textual string. The patterns show that the nuclear rises are aligned earlier in Catalan than in the German varieties. Within the German varieties, the alignment is earlier in Viennese than in Northern German. Differences are subtle but consistent, and all of them are likely reflecting the same phonological categorisation [8]. Figure 1: Tonal alignment patterns with acoustic segments for nuclear rising accents in Catalan, Vienna German and Northern German. In the AM approach, L and H are associated with a tone- bearing unit. This is usually the accented syllable, carrying the tone. However, in the examples shown above, the H peaks always fall outside of the accented syllable on the unstressed syllable when looking at the acoustic surface. In Catalan, the H peak occurs at the end of the consonant of the unstressed syllable, while it occurs at the end of the following vowel of the unstressed syllable in Northern German. In terms of a phonological association in the AM framework, we might state that L is phonologically associated with the left periphery of the unstressed syllable in Catalan and with the right periphery in Northern German, but this analysis is not very convincing. The picture is even more complicated when comparing Northern German and Viennese German. In both varieties, the rise is aligned with the vowel in the unstressed syllable, but it occurs at the beginning of the V segment in Viennese German and at the end of the same segment in Northern German. It is somewhat problematic to express all of the phonetic variation through differences in phonological associations, because such an approach seems to over- complicate the theory and raises the question of whether we can arbitrarily add categories to a theory whenever a new surface pattern is observed [8]. It our aim to exemplify how to treat variability within a dynamical account. 1.2. Coordination of tonal and oral gestures in AP Articulatory Phonology [9, 10] decomposes speech into a set of potentially overlapping units, articulatory gestures. The temporal organisation of gestures can be modelled by a doris.muecke@uni-koeln.de, anne.hermes@uni-koeln.de, tilsen@cornell.edu Copyright  2019 ISCA INTERSPEECH 2019 September 15–19, 2019, Graz, Austria http://dx.doi.org/10.21437/Interspeech.2019-2650 914