Why does coarticulation in speech production blur phonetic boundaries more for vowels than for consonants?

💡 Explanation

Vowels are more susceptible to coarticulation because their articulation involves longer duration and sustained vocal tract configurations; this allows for greater influence from neighboring sounds through gestural overlap. Therefore, formant transitions blend more, rather than consonants' shorter, more abrupt gestures that resist such assimilation.

• Why does the perception of phonetic boundaries shift in bimodal bilinguals?
• In multimodal communication, what causes an observer to misinterpret the co-speech gestures during a video call with degraded video quality?
• Why does epenthesis (vowel insertion) occur in certain consonant clusters during second language acquisition?
• A spacecraft transmits telemetry data to Earth using a convolutional code with Viterbi decoding. Which effect diminishes the ability to correct bit errors when atmospheric noise increases significantly?
• Why does initial ambiguity often arise in the interpretation of novel internet slang terms?
• Why does cuneiform script exhibit inherent data compression compared to pictographic systems?