A preliminary ultrasound study of Nepali lingual articulations Free

Previous descriptive and phonetic works on Nepali provided conflicting accounts of place contrasts in coronal consonants. Specifically, apical stops were characterized as either retroflex or alveolar, while laminal affricates were described as either alveolar or palatal. Some of these works used static palatography, which shows the contact between the tongue and the palate, but provides no information about the tongue shape for a given consonant or its dynamic properties. In this study we used ultrasound to image tongue shapes for various Nepali lingual consonants produced by a single native speaker of Brahmin dialect. The results showed that the speaker's apical stops were produced with a substantially raised tongue front and retracted tongue tip, as would be expected of retroflex articulations. Laminal affricates had the tongue shape similar to dental stops, yet with a somewhat retracted tongue tip, indicative of the alveolar constriction. Apicals that differed in laryngeal features (voiceless, voiced, aspirated, breathy) did not show systematic differences in the tongue shape, except for the voiced stop, which was somewhat less retracted. While limited to the single speaker, the results confirm and extend some previous observations about Nepali coronals as showing a 3-way place contrast among dentals, alveolars, and retroflexes.