Investigating dialectal differences using articulography

Abstract

The present study introduces articulography, the measurement of the position of tongue and lips during speech, as a promising method to the study of dialect variation. By using generalized additive modeling to analyze articulatory trajectories, we are able to reliably detect aggregate group differences, while simultaneously taking into account the individual variation across dozens of speakers. Our results on the basis of Dutch dialect data show clear differences between the southern and the northern dialect with respect to tongue position, with a more frontal tongue position in the dialect from Ubbergen (in the southern half of the Netherlands) than in the dialect of Ter Apel (in the northern half of the Netherlands). Thus articulography appears to be a suitable tool to investigate structural differences in pronunciation at the dialect level.

Quantitative identification of dialect-specific articulatory settings

“…Furthermore, a single-segment study is unsuitable to shed light on differences in articulatory settings, as differences in articulation of the specific segment and articulatory setting differences cannot be distinguished. Interestingly, Wieling et al (2015) and Wieling et al (2016) conducted an articulatory analysis of the tongue movement data associated with the word pronunciations (as opposed to the data associated with the pauses analyzed in this study) of the experiment explained above, and found a similar pattern as reported in the present study, with a more posterior tongue position for the speakers from Ter Apel compared to those from Ubbergen. This suggests that articulatory setting differences may also be observed when analyzing a sizeable amount of variable speech data (i.e., not only focusing on a single segment).…”

“…The experiment consisted of first naming 70 images (e.g., the image of a sheep, pronounced by the participant as an individual word "sheep") in their local dialect, and subsequently reading 27 consonant-vowel-consonant (CVC) sequences (C: /t,k,p/, V: /a,i,o/) from a computer screen in standard Dutch (see Wieling et al, 2015). Both parts were repeated twice, and the items within each repetition were ordered randomly.…”

Hierarchical generalized additive models: an introduction with mgcv

“…This, also, reduces co-linearity between the global smoother and the group-specific terms which occasionally leads to high uncertainty around the global smoother (see section V for more details). TPRS with m=1 have a more restricted null space than m=2 smoothers, so should not be as collinear with the global smoother (Wieling et al, 2016;Baayen et al, 2018). We have observed that this is much more of an issue when fitting model 3 compared to model 2.…”

Analyzing phonetic data with generalized additive mixed models

“…Introductions to GAMs focusing specifically on application to phonetics are Wieling et al (2016); Baayen and Linke (2019). Wieling et al (2016) used GAMs to analyze tongue movement data obtained with electromagnetic articulography, investigating the difference in articulatory trajectories between two Dutch dialects. Baayen and Linke (2019) analyzed the distribution and occurrence of pronunciation variants, extracted from the Buckeye corpus, with GAMs.…”