Obstruent voiced obstruents are common. This contrasts with sonorants, which are prototypically voiced and only rarely voiceless. Obstruent An obstruent is a speech sound such as , , or that is formed by "obstructing" airflow. Obstruents contrast with sonorants, which have no such obstruction and so resonate. All obstruents are consonants, but sonorants include both vowels and consonants. Obstruents are subdivided into plosives (oral stops), such as , with complete occlusion of the vocal tract, often followed by a release burst; fricatives, such as , with limited closure, not stopping airflow but making it turbulent; and affricates, which begin with complete
Neurocomputational speech processing vocal tract actions (also called articulatory gestures), which need to be activated in order to produce a speech item, their degree of realization and duration, and the temporal organization of all vocal tract actions building up a speech item (for a detailed description of vocal tract actions scores see e.g. Kröger & Birkholz 2007). The detailed realization of each vocal tract action (articulatory gesture) depends on the temporal organization of all vocal tract actions building up a speech item and especially on their temporal overlap. Thus the detailed realization of each vocal tract action within an speech item is specified