The EMA Study on the Inter-individual Variability and Differences in Articulation between Polish Oral and Nasalised Vowels

The electromagnetic articulography (EMA) is a relatively exact and efficient method used in study on speech production physiology. It allows to precisely estimate movement trajectories of speech articulators like tongue, lips, jaw etc. by tracking position of sensors fixed to the articulators. This paper presents results of EMA research on Polish oral and nasalised vowels in orthography represented by the graphemes <e>, <o>, <ę>, <ą>. Inter-individual variability of tongue and lips position in X-axis direction during realization of the same phoneme has been estimated. Differences between oral and nasalised vowels in terms of movement of articulators in X-axis direction have been assessed too.

Are You in English Gear?

It is assumed that the overall combination of the positioning of speech articulators such as the tongue, jaws and lips differs per language, which is commonly referred to as articulatory settings. Previous studies involving analytic listening, as well as acoustic analyses and those based on modern scanning techniques that can visualize the vocal tract claim to have found evidence for the existence of articulatory settings; yet, thus far none of these seems to have found unambiguous measurable evidence for language specific settings. The present study attempts to acoustically measure differences between the settings of English and Dutch under optimal conditions, based on within-speaker comparisons of comparable vowels in similar phonetic contexts. Formant frequencies of eight different Dutch-English vowel pairs that appear in interlingual homophones produced by five advanced Dutch learners of English were measured for this purpose. Statistical analyses of the acoustic data seem to point to overall distinct patterns in the positions of Dutch and English vowels, which can be related to the language-specific settings of the two languages examined. Most of all, the outcomes of the analyses seem to highlight the dynamic nature of articulation, which can explain the difficulty previous studies have encountered.

Exploitation of morphological possibilities in signed languages

American Sign Language shares with spoken languages derivational and inflectional morphological processes, including compounding, reduplication, incorporation, and, arguably, templates. Like spoken languages, ASL also has an extensive nonderivational, noninflectional morphology involving phonological alternation although this is typically more limited. Additionally, ASL frequently associates meaning with individual phonological parameters. This association is atypical of spoken languages. We account for these phenomena by positing “ion-morphs,” which are phonologically incomplete lexical items that bond with other compatible ion-morphs. These ion-morphs draw lexical items into “families” of related signs. In contrast, ASL makes little, if any, use of concatenative affixation, a morphological mechanism common among spoken languages. We propose that this difference is the result of the comparative slowness of movement of the manual articulators as compared to the speech articulators, as well as the perceptual robustness of the manual articulators to the visual system. The slowness of the manual articulators disfavors concatenative affixation. The perceptual robustness of the manual articulators allows ASL to exploit morphological potential that spoken language can use only at considerable cost.

On pharynx—larynx interactions

The role which the pharynx plays in the production of speech sounds has long been the subject of debate, in particular as regards the independence of the pharynx from other speech articulators and in particular the larynx. Given that the linguistic and anatomical information about the larynx and the pharynx is quite complex, the objective of this paper is to review the literature relevant to the relationship between these two articulators and to recast some of this information in terms of current articulator-based theories of phonological features such as the ones reviewed in McCarthy (1988). 1 presents two pharyngeal features [ATR/ RTR] ‘advanced tongue root’ and ‘LL/RL’ ‘lowered larynx’separately in two subsections, with definitions, examples and arguments in favour of having two pharyngeal features rather than one. § 2 argues that pharyngeal features are independent of the primary point of articulation features.

Movements of the Upper and Lower Lips during Speech

Inferior-superior displacements of the upper lip, lower lip, and jaw were transduced with a strain-gauge system in 4 normal-speaking adults. Movements of the upper and lower lips were compared across conditions in which the jaw was free to move and when bite blocks were used to fix the jaw at four different vertical positions. As jaw-open position was increased with the bite blocks, it was found that: (a) Positions of both lips changed for bilabial closure, but the closing movements did not usually maintain consistent proportions between lips across different bite-block sizes; (b) although the lips maintained fairly consistent maximum interlabial opening across many conditions, this opening was reduced in the small bite-block conditions; and (c) in a few cases there was an increase in the duration of lip-closing movements, but these were small and inconsistent. The findings are discussed relative to possible organizational systems that would produce the observed interactions among speech articulators.