Can locus equations model dialect-specific variation in coarticulation?

Cross-linguistic coarticulatory differences are experimentally challenging to disentangle. This paper aims to assess whether traditional locus equations constitute a suitable heuristic tool to highlight regional differences in coarticulation patterns. For this purpose, three highly similar dialects were chosen, i.e., Bari, Cagliari, and Palermo Italian. C-V effects were examined in CV and VC sequences (V=/a/; C=/p, t, k, f, s, m, n/). A two-step acoustic analysis was performed on 648 phonetically controlled utterances, read by 24 speakers, and sampled from the CLIPS corpus. Subsequently, traditional locus equations and alternative linear regressions were compared. The results show that locus equations do not adequately model variation of subtle dynamic patterns. Yet significant dialect-specific differences in coarticulation emerged fitting alternative linear regressions.