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Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 119: 3305. 2006
It has been proposed that phonological contrasts are phonetically realized not only by their primary articulations, but often also by enhancing gestures [Kingston & Diehl "Phonetic knowledge," Language, 70, 419-454 (1994); Stevens & Keyser, "Primary features and their enhancement in consonants," Language, 65, 81-106 (1989)]. Meanwhile, enhancement appears to parallel the well-known phenomenon of multiplicity of cues in speech perception [Lisker "Voicing in English: Acatologue of acoustic features signaling /b/ versus /p/ in trochees." Lang. Speech, 29, 3-11 (1986)]. An interesting question is therefore whether the two are one and the same. By a narrow definition, only articulatory maneuvers not obligated by the articulatory gestures of the phonetic units in question play an enhancing role. Thus not all cues that benefit perception are generated for the sake of enhancement. On the other hand, there may indeed be cases where genuine enhancement occurs, for which a further question is why is it needed in the first place? One possibility is that enhancement is not only for resisting noise in the speech environment, but also for handling the competition among communicative functions that are transmitted in parallel. That is, multiple communicative functions often share the same acoustic/articulatory dimension and such functional crowding may create the need to exploit additional means of encoding. If so, both enhancement and multiplicity of cues could be part of a live process that maintains the effectiveness of speech communication.