Coarticulation

The subject of coarticulation is a really big one in phonetics, and it has dominated speech production research and theory-making for decades. Wikipedia’s treatment of coarticulation is, therefore, really disappointing, and needs a thorough overhaul. For a start, there is only a single reference at the end of the article, and that is to a book on historical linguistics, so the few generalizations made about the topic are almost completely unsupported. The text implies that coarticulation is only concerned with the influence of a single segment upon another, adjacent, single segment, whereas one of the most interesting things that coarticulation research has shown is how its effects can spread over many segments. We get a list of names of different coarticulation theories with no explanation of what they are, and the first bullet point in the discussion of the topic only mentions assimilation of place. The reader is given no guidance on the relationship between assimilation and coarticulation. So it’s a very unsatisfactory little article. Writing a proper article on the subject will be no easy task.

At the end we get a short explanation of the difference between coarticulation and co-articulated consonants (as in the voiceless labial-velar plosive /k͡p/ found in many West African languages). This confusing terminology is not Wikipedia’s fault.