It is often taken for granted that the glides [j] and [w] differ from their high-vowel counterparts [i] and [u] by having a greater degree of constriction and shorter duration. Yet there is little phonetic research to support these assumptions. Furthermore, although phonological patterns indicate that vowels and glides can be distinct phonemic categories, the extent to which their phonetic properties are categorically distinguished by speakers is unknown. We conducted an experiment to investigate articulatory and acoustic differences between productions of English vowels and glides at palatal and labio-velar places of articulation, in which participants imitated ambiguous intervocalic stimuli which varied in duration and intensity. The results showed that all speakers manipulated temporal aspects of their imitations of both palatal and labio-velar targets, while only some speakers manipulated constriction degree, and only for the labio-velars. This finding suggests that temporal organization may be more important than constriction degree for the glide-vowel distinction. Furthermore, temporal variables were often non-linearly related to stimulus duration, supporting the hypothesis that there exists a categorical difference in the temporal organization of articulatory gestures for vowels vs glides.

人们通常认为滑音 [j] 和 [w] 不同于它们的高元音对应物 [i] 和 [u]，因为它们具有更大程度的收缩和更短的持续时间。然而，支持这些假设的语音研究很少。此外，虽然语音模式表明元音和滑音可以是不同的音素类别，但它们的语音特性在多大程度上被说话者分类区分是未知的。我们进行了一项实验，以研究英语元音的发音和发音之间的发音和声学差异，在该实验中，参与者模仿了持续时间和强度各不相同的模棱两可的语音间刺激。结果表明，所有说话者都操纵了他们对腭和唇腭目标的模仿的时间方面，而只有一些说话者操纵了收缩程度，并且仅针对唇腭。这一发现表明，对于滑音-元音区别，时间组织可能比收缩程度更重要。此外，时间变量通常与刺激持续时间非线性相关，支持元音和滑音的发音手势的时间组织存在分类差异的假设。