Coarticulation refers to the mutual influence of adjacent speech sounds on each other’s pronunciation, resulting in overlapped articulatory gestures. For instance, the production of a vowel sound is influenced by the upcoming consonant, leading to its modification. Conversely, the pronunciation of a consonant is affected by the preceding vowel. This phenomenon occurs due to the temporal constraints and the overlapping movements of the articulators (e.g., tongue, lips, jaw) during speech production. Coarticulation contributes to the naturalness and connectedness of speech, but can also pose challenges for speech recognition systems.
