coarticulated

Coarticulated describes a speech segment that is produced with overlapping articulatory gestures from adjacent sounds. In fluent speech, the tongue, lips, jaw, and other articulators move in overlapping trajectories, so the articulation of a phoneme is influenced by surrounding phonemes and their contexts.

Two common patterns are anticipatory coarticulation, where a following segment affects the current articulation, and carryover (or perseverative) coarticulation, where a preceding gesture continues into the next segment. Because of coarticulation, acoustic cues such as formant transitions and timing of consonants and vowels vary with context, and sounds can be perceived with telltale signs of neighboring sounds.

Coarticulation is a central concept in phonetics and explains why speech is fluid rather than a sequence of isolated phonemes. It has implications for speech perception, speech synthesis, and automatic recognition, as listeners rely on overlapping cues to interpret sounds. Researchers study coarticulation with articulatory measurements—such as electromagnetic articulography and ultrasound—and with acoustic analyses to quantify gesture overlap and timing.

The phenomenon is widespread across languages, though the degree and pattern of coarticulation vary with phonotactics, speaking style, and rate. The term also extends to related fields, including the study of sign languages, where overlapping movements of hands and facial articulation show analogous coarticulatory effects. Overall, coarticulated articulation reflects the dynamic, interactive nature of human speech production.