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Tongue retraction is not so useful after all

Wood, Sidney A J LU (1978) In Studies in General Linguistics Presented to Bertil Malmberg by Students and Colleagues on the Occasion of his 65th Birthday (Working papers, Phonetics Laboratory, Department of General Linguistics, Lund University)
Abstract
This article reports model experiments where vocal tract profiles of high and mid unrounded front and high rounded back vowels were systematically modified to simulate small constriction shifts along the hard or soft palate, in order to test A. M. Bell's century-old proposal that small shifts of tongue arch fronting or retraction would yield audible shifts of vowel timbre. Such differences were claimed to explain audible differences of vowel timbre between dialects or between languages. The claim has never been validated and is contridicted on several counts: the Bell model provides an inaccurate account of articulatory activity for vowels, tongue arch position is irrelevant for tuning vocal tract resonances, the Bell model is based on the... (More)
This article reports model experiments where vocal tract profiles of high and mid unrounded front and high rounded back vowels were systematically modified to simulate small constriction shifts along the hard or soft palate, in order to test A. M. Bell's century-old proposal that small shifts of tongue arch fronting or retraction would yield audible shifts of vowel timbre. Such differences were claimed to explain audible differences of vowel timbre between dialects or between languages. The claim has never been validated and is contridicted on several counts: the Bell model provides an inaccurate account of articulatory activity for vowels, tongue arch position is irrelevant for tuning vocal tract resonances, the Bell model is based on the single resonance theory and cannot accommodate several formants, and quantal theory suggests that local shifts of contriction location should not yield any audible spectral shift in F2. The results confirmed that F2 of all these vowels was insensitive to fronting and retraction in Bell's sense. However, F3 of the unrounded front vowels fell steadily from fronted to retracted, as expected from perturbation theory (the fronted position is near a volume velocity antinode for F3 and the retracted position is close to a volume velocity node). This explains the often reported sharpness of, say Swedish and, Russian prepalatal front vowels, and the dullness of, say, English midpalatal front vowels. (Less)
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author
organization
publishing date
type
Working paper/Preprint
publication status
published
subject
in
Studies in General Linguistics Presented to Bertil Malmberg by Students and Colleagues on the Occasion of his 65th Birthday (Working papers, Phonetics Laboratory, Department of General Linguistics, Lund University)
ISSN
0348-4831
language
English
LU publication?
yes
id
2622be31-7f71-4168-b63f-17602d5aaab3 (old id 529384)
date added to LUP
2016-04-04 09:44:35
date last changed
2018-11-21 20:55:20
@misc{2622be31-7f71-4168-b63f-17602d5aaab3,
  abstract     = {{This article reports model experiments where vocal tract profiles of high and mid unrounded front and high rounded back vowels were systematically modified to simulate small constriction shifts along the hard or soft palate, in order to test A. M. Bell's century-old proposal that small shifts of tongue arch fronting or retraction would yield audible shifts of vowel timbre. Such differences were claimed to explain audible differences of vowel timbre between dialects or between languages. The claim has never been validated and is contridicted on several counts: the Bell model provides an inaccurate account of articulatory activity for vowels, tongue arch position is irrelevant for tuning vocal tract resonances, the Bell model is based on the single resonance theory and cannot accommodate several formants, and quantal theory suggests that local shifts of contriction location should not yield any audible spectral shift in F2. The results confirmed that F2 of all these vowels was insensitive to fronting and retraction in Bell's sense. However, F3 of the unrounded front vowels fell steadily from fronted to retracted, as expected from perturbation theory (the fronted position is near a volume velocity antinode for F3 and the retracted position is close to a volume velocity node). This explains the often reported sharpness of, say Swedish and, Russian prepalatal front vowels, and the dullness of, say, English midpalatal front vowels.}},
  author       = {{Wood, Sidney A J}},
  issn         = {{0348-4831}},
  language     = {{eng}},
  note         = {{Working Paper}},
  series       = {{Studies in General Linguistics Presented to Bertil Malmberg by Students and Colleagues on the Occasion of his 65th Birthday (Working papers, Phonetics Laboratory, Department of General Linguistics, Lund University)}},
  title        = {{Tongue retraction is not so useful after all}},
  year         = {{1978}},
}