Jaw movement and coronal stop spectra in Central Arrernte

Stress Effects on Stop Bursts in Five Languages

“…The palatal /c/ seems to resist modification to its stop burst in all of the languages studied here, regardless of the number of places of articulation. As mentioned above, this is likely a concomitant of the palatal's strong coarticulatory resistance, due to the laminal articulation recruiting a large part of the tongue body, and temporarily immobilizing the jaw in order to achieve the clearly shaped acoustic output of the affricated stop burst (Tabain, 2012).…”

“…We also pointed out that the palatal /c/ does not appear to show any spectral enhancement under stress. One other feature that deserves mention here is [diffuse] (whose counterpart is [compact]), which Tabain (2012) has suggested characterizes the lamino-dental /t ̪/ spectrum of Arrernte. In that study, diffuseness was measured using the second spectral moment, with the dental having a higher value on this measure than the other three coronals in this language.…”

“…It should be noted that standard deviation results were not presented in the study of stop burst spectra under stress in Pitjantjatjara, since it was not found to be useful for stress in that language. However, standard deviation has proven useful in previous work on jaw movement and stop bursts in Arrernte, where it is used to separate the lamino-dental stop /t ̪/ from the three other coronal stops /t ʈ c/ (Tabain, 2012). We therefore chose to include the second spectral moment in the present study, given its established usefulness in separating out the dental stop from the other coronals in Arrernte.…”

Lexical stress and stop bursts in Pitjantjatjara: Feature enhancement of neutralized apicals and the coronal/velar contrast

“…2 However, subtle differences between the alveolar and the retroflex stop burst (i.e. at the right edge of the consonant) have been documented for both Pitjantjatjara and a neighboring, though unrelated language, Arrernte (Tabain & Butcher, in press;Tabain, 2012). Both the alveolar and the retroflex stop bursts have a broad spectral peak which drops off at about 4 kHz in the context of the central vowels: Arrernte /ə, a/ and Pitjantjatjara /a/.…”

“…In Tabain and Butcher (in press) we interpret this result as a consequence of the ballistic nature of the movement for the prototypical retroflex: we suggest that in the context of /i/, it is possible that the retroflex "overshoots" its virtual release target. This is due to the conflicting cues sent to the tongue body articulator, with the tongue body required to be low and back in order to allow the tongue tip to curl backwards for retroflex closure, but at the same time to be high and forward for the following /i/ vowel (see Tabain, 2012 for data on the low tongue and jaw position for the retroflex in a central vowel context in Arrernte). 3 As a consequence, the tongue body may be further forward than is normally the case, leading the tongue tip to release the retroflex articulation further forward than planned.…”