We have investigated the movements of the epiglottis in speech by speakers of Hebrew. The epiglottis functions as an articulator in the production of pharyngeal consonants and in the vowel /a/. It is also involved in whisper. In pharyngeals, the epiglottis articulates against the posterior pharyngeal wall; the constriction varies from a full closure (pharyngeal stop) in some examples of /?/ in slow careful speech, through a narrow opening for the fricatives /h/ and other examples of /?/ in connected speech, to a fairly open glide in yet other examples of /?/ in rapid or casual style. In the vowel /a/, the opening between the pharynx and the epiglottis is of the same general shape as for the pharyngeal consonants, but larger. In the case of both consonants and /a/, however, the size of the opening is never large enough to pull the lateral edges of the epiglottis away from the posterior pharyngeal wall. That is, air passes only through a passage bounded by the epiglottis and the pharynx, and never escapes along the tongue root lateral to the epiglottis. The epiglottis folds toward the pharyngeal wall independently of the tongue root in consonants; this independence is seen in some cases of /a/ and not others; in whisper, the epiglottis is generally more retracted than in normal speech but otherwise moves as usual. Our conclusions are based on 100 minutes of videotape made using a fiberscope positioned in the upper pharynx, spectrograms, and dissections. We conclude that the epiglottis is an active, independent, and acoustically significant articulator.

We believe that the importance of the epiglottis in speech has been generally underestimated in the phonetic literature. Our evidence leads us to conclude that the epiglottis is an active and independent articulator in the production of pharyngeal consonants and that it is involved in the production of the vowel [a] and in whisper. In earlier phonetic works that we have examined, to the extent that the epiglottis is mentioned at all, it is generally said to have no speech function. An exception to this is the work of Russell (1931), Appelman (1967) and Wilson (1976), where they suggest that the epiglottis is crucial to the production of [a], but because they rely on lateral x-rays, they are unable to complete a convincing case.

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It has been shown that in Fijian, relatively well-defined targets exist for the position of the jaw at greatest opening during vowels or greatest closing during consonants [1. D. Condax, J. Acoust. Soc. Am. Suppl. 65, S25(A) (1979)]. It has also been shown that a model can be constructed to account for most of the variance in vowel durations in connected speech [I. D. Condax, J. Acoust. Soc. Am. Suppl. 66, S50(A) (1979)]. It is here proposed that the duration and jaw position for vowels are correlated in a model of speech production that describes vowel duration as independent (determined by phonological and phonetic factors such as length, stress, and height), and where jaw position can be predicted from duration, although it is also dependent on position during adjacent consonants, and, to an unexpectedly small extent, on vowel height. [Work supported by NEH and the University of Hawaii Foundation.]