Palatalization in coronal consonants of Polish: A three-/four-dimensional ultrasound study

Abstract

This paper presents the results of an articulatory study of palatalized consonants in Polish, a language with a typologically rare concentration of two phonemic series of posterior sibilants, one inherently palatalized, and the other contextually (allophonically) palatalized. For both phonemic and allophonic palatalization in Polish, it was found that the most stable correlates of palatalization are the advancement of the tongue root and a combined effect of raising and fronting of the tongue body. The advancement of the tongue root can be interpreted as the driving force in palatalization, while the effect of tongue body fronting and raising can be seen as secondary, resulting from the movement of the tongue root and the characteristic of the tongue as a muscular hydrostat.

Variation in the articulation of Russian stressed vowels and the mechanics of palatalization in consonants

“…A consequence of this analysis is that the soft-hard distinction among consonants in Russian might also be better expressed in terms of [ATR] rather than [back] and/or [high]. While the feature [ATR] is usually used in reference to vowels, there is no a priori reason to exclude it from use in consonants as well (e.g., Halle & Stevens 1969;Trigo 1986;Vaux 1992Vaux , 1996Cavar 2004Cavar , 2007Lindau 1978;Rose 1996;Snider 1984;Hansson 2001;Beltzung et al 2015;Cavar et al 2020).…”

“…We assume that [+/-ATR] and Expanded refer to the same dimension of contrast. 6 While the original proposal in Cavar (2004) was primarily based on theoretical system-internal arguments, recent instrumental phonetic studies of Polish , Cavar et al 2020, Russian (Matsui & Kochetov 2018), and Irish (Bennett et al 2018) lend support. [ATR] is a relative newcomer to phonological theory, probably due to the relative inaccessibility of the tongue root for direct inspection.…”

“…The term appeared first in Stewart (1967). [ATR] was originally used as a distinctive feature for vowels, but recent studies show an effect of tongue root position in consonants, too (Matsui & Kochetov 2018;Cavar et al 2020;and others, e.g., see also references in Beltzung et al 2015).…”

“…Fully uncompressed DICOM ultrasound files were transferred from the ultrasound machine to a Windows 10 computer for analysis. The DICOM files were analyzed with a custom MATLAB toolbox called "WASL", 8 following Charles & Lulich (2018, 2019, Patel et al (2019), , and Cavar et al (2020).…”

“…While 2D ultrasound has been widely used in phonetics research for many years (e.g., Gick 2002, Davidson 2002, Miller & Finch 2011, Proctor 2011, Zharkova 2013, Mielke 2015, Boyce et al 2016, Al-Tairi et al 2017, Strycharczuk & Scobbie 2017, Turton 2017, Ahn 2018, Bennett et al 2018, Tabain & Beare 2018, 3D/4D ultrasound is a relatively new technology that was originally used in speech and swallowing research by Chi-Fishman et al (2000), Bressmann et al (2007), and Bressmann (2010). Modern 3D/4D ultrasound equipment, described by Lulich et al (2018) and Lulich & Pearson (2019), has recently been used to study liquid sound articulation in American English (Berkson et al 2017), South Korean (Hwang et al 2019a;Hwang et al 2019b), and Brazilian Portuguese (Charles & Lulich 2018, 2019, as well as tongue dorsum and tongue root articulation in Arabic (Mokh et al, 2020) and Polish (Cavar et al 2017;Lulich et al 2017;Cavar et al 2020).…”