The effects of syllable and utterance position on tongue shape and gestural magnitude in /l/ and /r

Lawson, Eleanor; Leplatre, Gregory; Stuart-Smith, Jane; Scobbie, James M

Abstract

This paper is an ultrasound-based articulatory study of the impact of syllable-position and utterance position on tongue shape and tongue-gesture magnitude in liquid consonants in American, Irish and Scottish English. Mixed effects modelling was used to analyse variation in normalised tongue-gesture magnitude for /r/ and /l/ in syllable-onset and coda position and in utterance-initial, medial and final position. Variation between onset and coda mean midsagittal tongue surfaces was also quantified using normalised root-mean-square distances, and patterns of articulatory onset-coda allophony were identified. Despite the fact that some speakers in all varieties used tip-up /r/ in syllable-onset position and bunched /r/ in coda position, RMS distance results show greater degrees of similarity between onset and coda /r/ than between onset and coda /l/. Gesture magnitude was significantly reduced for both /l/ and /r/ in coda position. Utterance position had a significant effect on /l/ only.

Citation

Lawson, E., Leplatre, G., Stuart-Smith, J., & Scobbie, J. M. (2019). The effects of syllable and utterance position on tongue shape and gestural magnitude in /l/ and /r. In Proceedings of the 19th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (432-436)

• Conference Name: 19th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences
• Conference Location: Melbourne, Australia
• Start Date: Aug 5, 2019
• End Date: Aug 9, 2019
• Publication Date: 2019
• Deposit Date: Dec 17, 2019
• Publicly Available Date: Dec 17, 2019
• Pages: 432-436
• Book Title: Proceedings of the 19th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences
• ISBN: 978-0-646-80069-1
• Keywords: Articulatory Phonetics; Ultrasound Tongue Imaging; allophony
• Public URL: http://researchrepository.napier.ac.uk/Output/1906044