Alexei Kochetov is giving a talk at York University (Keele campus) this Thursday, Oct 24, 5:15-6:15.
The talk will take place in Ross S 562 and will be followed by a reception
in the Department of Languages, Literatures and Linguistics.
Title: Tracking and Imaging the Tongue: New insights into language-particular phonetic variability
Abstract:
"Early articulatory phonetic research using static palatography and x-ray
imaging was crucial to the development of phonetic and phonological
theories, and provided important foundations for phonetic typology. For
many decades, however, articulatory research has been limited to a small
number of research labs, as it required costly equipment, extensive
training, and labour-intensive data analysis. While this is still true to
some extent, new methods of articulatory data collection and analysis are
becoming increasingly available and gradually more affordable. This,
together with the increased collaboration among researchers/labs and the
discipline-wide growing interest in experimentation, is likely to provide a
new impetus to the applied and theoretic phonetics/phonology research. In
this talk I will present results from two studies that are part of a larger
collaborative effort to develop a cross-language corpus of articulatory
data with the goal to explore the data’s implications for applied and
theoretical research. The first study employs electropalatography to
examine the degree of linguopalatal contact for Japanese voiced, voiceless
singleton, and voiceless geminate stops. These contrasts are traditionally
analyzed as involving voicing and length features. The results of the study
show that the three classes of consonants differ in the relative tightness
of the constriction (e.g. /t:/ > /t/ > /d/). This suggests that the primary
distinction may involve the feature ‘tense’, thus making the Japanese
stop contrasts parallel to those of Korean. The second study (in
collaboration with the All-India Institute of Speech and Hearing) uses
ultrasound to image the tongue during the production of retroflex and
dental consonants in Kannada (Dravidian). Retroflexes in Dravidian
languages have been observed to involve substantial curling of the tongue
tip towards the palate. Much less is known about the overall shape of the
tongue and its dynamics during the retroflex production. The results of the
study provide some insight into the process, potentially explaining facts
of the retroflex patterning in phonology and acquisition."
No comments:
Post a Comment