The articulatory dynamics of pre-velar and pre-nasal /æ/-raising in English: An ultrasound study

Abstract

Most dialects of North American English exhibit /æ/-raising in some phonological contexts. Both the conditioning environments and the temporal dynamics of the raising vary from region to region. To explore the articulatory basis of /æ/-raising across North American English dialects, acoustic and articulatory data were collected from a regionally diverse group of 24 English speakers from the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom. A method for examining the temporal dynamics of speech directly from ultrasound video using EigenTongues decomposition [Hueber, Aversano, Chollet, Denby, Dreyfus, Oussar, Roussel, and Stone (2007). in IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (Cascadilla, Honolulu, HI)] was applied to extract principal components of filtered images and linear regression to relate articulatory variation to its acoustic consequences. This technique was used to investigate the tongue movements involved in /æ/ production, in order to compare the tongue gestures involved in the various /æ/-raising patterns, and to relate them to their apparent phonetic motivations (nasalization, voicing, and tongue position).

Articulatory dynamics of (de)gemination in Dutch

“…We followed up the static analysis of averaged tongue contours with a dynamic analysis of the articulatory transition throughout /ar/. We used Principle Component Analysis (PCA) of pixel intensity data to reduce the information in the ultrasonic frames (Hueber et al, 2007;Carignan et al, 2016;Hoole & Pouplier, 2017;Mielke et al, 2017). We used all ultrasonic frames (in JPG format) corresponding to a speech signal in our recordings as input to the PCA.…”

Rorövovarorsospoproråkoketot: Language games and Swedish phonology

“…In light of this, one could revise the phonetic explanation for raising so that palatal or velar gestures are triggers. Raising before velars is familiar from patterns in other languages, such as /ae/-tensing in many varieties of American English (Labov 1994, Mielke, Carignan, andThomas 2017). However, this revised explanation will not do either: /ɧ/, a plain, unpalatalized velar for many speakers (see Ladefoged and Maddieson 1996: 171-172), never triggers pre-palatal raising: A final defense of the phonetic hypothesis might be that /ɧ/ is a fricative, while /kʲ, gʲ, ŋʲ/ are stops.…”

Begging for bags: BAG-raising and prescriptive ideologies in Spokane Washington

“…Midwestern speakers were found to front /g/ relative to /k/. Mielke et al (2017) argues that this relative frontness of /g/ may be the original basis for BAG-raising. However, a difference in the articulation of /k/ and /g/ was not found in speakers from the Pacific Northwest, leading Mielke et al (2017) to conclude that BAG-raising spread as a phonological rule (without an articulatory basis) to the PNW.…”

“…Despite the phonological similarities between BAG-raising in the Midwest and BAG-raising in the PNW, Mielke et al (2017) uses an ultra-sound study of speakers to show that the articulation of these clusters actually differs between the two regions. Midwestern speakers were found to front /g/ relative to /k/.…”

“…Mielke et al (2017) argues that this relative frontness of /g/ may be the original basis for BAG-raising. However, a difference in the articulation of /k/ and /g/ was not found in speakers from the Pacific Northwest, leading Mielke et al (2017) to conclude that BAG-raising spread as a phonological rule (without an articulatory basis) to the PNW. This contrasts with Wassink's (2017) analysis of the phenomenon who argues that since "The dialect literature shows no clear evidence of this pattern in the regions whose speakers settled the Pacific Northwest," it is "difficult to argue that this pattern was inherited" (79-80).…”