Contact Pattern of Alveolar Consonants in the Malay Consonants of Paralysis Subject using Electropalatography

Abstract

Articulation is a combination between respiratory organs (lungs, throat, vellum, mouth, and nose) and speech organs or articulators (lips, tongue, soft palate, hard palate and teeth) in order to produce speech sound [1]. During speech, human produce many types of sound due to the characteristic of each sound. The place and manner of articulation, including the articulator are important elements to generate different speech sounds. In Malay language, there are six types of manner of articulation, and six types of place of articulation [2]. The manners of articulation are plosive, nasal, affricate, fricative, approximant and lateral approximant while the places of articulation are, alveolar, postalveolar, velar and glottal [3]. Speech is one of the essential elements in communication. Failure of speech may cause communicatio n breakdown. The failure of speech is caused by a number of problems, commonly health problem. Wendy et al. (2018) in their study stated that, there are differences in hearing and speech difficulties as well as facial appearances for the people Abstract: Place of articulation plays an important part to produce different sounds. Besides the place of articulation, tongue is also an active articulator during a continuous speech. During the speech, the tongue moves around creating different sounds when it is placed at different place of articulation. The movement of tongue is controlled by muscles. The lack of muscle movement will produce inactive tongue movement. Paralysis is an example of the muscle weakness in a person resulting in difficulties to move. Paralysis may occur due to several factors including stroke and spinal cord injury (SCI). One of the indirect effects of paralysis is slurred speech and difficulty in speaking. This study aims to determine the contact pattern of five paralysed subjects during speech production of alveolar consonants in the Malay Language. The subjects had paralysis due to different aetiologies and with different medical history backgrounds. All participants were required to produce five single consonants;