This paper provides a statistical account of schwa elision and vowel nasalization, and of nasalization and deletion of plosives in a large corpus of German spontaneous dialogues in comparison with an equally large data base of read speech (sentences and texts) from large groups of North German speakers. The phonetic variability of these phrase-level processes is projected onto the articulatory dynamics in global opening and closing gestures, which are taken to be basic phonetic structures of speech communication. Trends for gesture reorganization are derived from statistics, and related to external control factors of word boundary, word class, speech style as well as internal phonetic conditions of gestural make-up and of reduction of articulatory complexity. These synchronic facts of one language are compared with parallel instances from other languages and linked to congruent diachronic data of sound change, thus laying the foundation for generalizable phrase-level patterns of human speech production.