The effects of syllable and utterance position on tongue shape and gestural magnitude in /l/ and /r/
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Date
2019-08-10Author
Lawson, Eleanor
Leplatre, Gregory
Stuart-Smith, Jane
Scobbie, James M.
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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 (ICPhS), Melbourne, 5-9 August 2019, [Paper no: ] (In Press).
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.