This study tested the hypothesis that consonant and vowel are synchronised at the syllable onset, and that such synchronised co-onset is the essence of coarticulation. Articulatory data were collected for Mandarin Chinese, using Electromagnetic Articulography (EMA), and acoustic data were collected simultaneously. As a departure from conventional approaches, a minimal triplet paradigm was applied, in which divergence points between movement trajectories in contrastive pairs were used to determine segmental onsets. Triplets of disyllabic words consisting of two matching contrastive pairs in a C₁V₁#C₂V₂ structure were used, whereby the consonant pair differed only in C₂ and the vowel pair differed only in V₂ (the numerical indices indicate syllable position). Both articulatory and acoustical results showed that the articulation of vowels and consonants started at about the same time, thus supporting the CV synchrony hypothesis. The realisation of CV synchronisation was dimension specific, however. For any particular articulator, only the dimensions free of consonantal requirement started their movements toward the vowel from the syllable onset, while the rest of the dimensions moved toward successive consonantal and vocalic targets. The finding of CV co-onset increases the amount of temporal overlap between C and V relative to the widely assumed CV asynchrony. The evidence of dimension-specific sequential articulation sheds further light on coarticulation by offering a timing-based explanation for the well-known phenomenon of coarticulation resistance.

这项研究检验了辅音和元音在音节开始时同步的假设，并且这种同步的同音是共同发音的本质。使用电磁发音法 (EMA) 收集汉语普通话的发音数据，同时收集声学数据。作为与传统方法的背离，应用了最小三重范式，其中使用对比对中的运动轨迹之间的分歧点来确定节段起始。使用由 C ₁ V ₁ #C ₂ V ₂结构中的两个匹配对比对组成的双音节词的三元组，其中辅音对仅在 C _{2 上}不同，元音对仅在 V 上不同₂（数字索引表示音节位置）。发音和声学结果表明元音和辅音的发音大约在同一时间开始，从而支持 CV 同步假设。然而，CV 同步的实现是特定于维度的。对于任何特定的发音器，只有没有辅音要求的维度从音节开始向元音移动，而其余维度则向连续的辅音和声部目标移动。相对于广泛假设的 CV 异步，CV co-onset 的发现增加了 C 和 V 之间的时间重叠量。