14th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS-14) San Francisco, CA, USA August 1-7, 1999

The Production of Coronals in Hyper and Hypo Speech

Sture Lundqvist (1), Per Lindblad (2)

(1) Department of Prosthetic Dentistry, Göteborg, Sweden
(2) Department of Linguistics, Göteborg, Sweden

The coronals [stdln] have place-neutral articulatory gestures: The front tongue creates a constriction against the structure(s) anatomically opposite to it. On the contrary, [ɴʃʁ] have displaced gestures.
   When changing from hyper to hypo style, Swedish postalveolar /ɴ/ and [ʃ] move substantially forwards and /s/ somewhat backwards in EPG registrations; the [ʃ] change is greatest, reflecting its more posterior hyper gesture. Thus, constriction place patterns of /s/, /ɴ/, and [ʃ] in hypo as compared to hyper speech is characterized by an aggregation in a much smaller sagittal range along the middle part of the alveolar range, covering the neutral gesture. We hypothesise that this aggregation is closely connected with the neutral coronal gesture: The front tongue articulates closer to this gesture in phrases than in isolated productions. Unsystematic studies of Swedish [tdln] and [ʁ] support this hypothesis. Speech more hypo will probably show a still more narrow range.

Full Paper

Bibliographic reference.  Lundqvist, Sture / Lindblad, Per (1999): "The production of coronals in hyper and hypo speech", In ICPhS-14, 421-424.