This project investigates the articulatory properties of German vowels on the basis of tagged Cine-MRI data. German has (1)5 monophthongs, which are classified into seven tense-lax pairs. Understanding the phonetic correlate of vowel tenseness has proven elusive, partly due to the difficulty of obtaining global shape information for the tongue, especially the pharyngeal portion. Tagged Cine-MRI allows motion trajectories for individual tissue points to be tracked and strains to be calculated. From these data one can infer contraction patterns of the muscles of the tongue. The current project uses this technique to compare four tense and lax vowel pairs in terms of muscular compression and expansion patterns as well as root-blade motion.
Cite as: Pouplier, M., Stone, M. (2005) A tagged-cine MRI investigation of German vowels. Proc. Interspeech 2005, 2157-2160, doi: 10.21437/Interspeech.2005-437
@inproceedings{pouplier05_interspeech,
author={Marianne Pouplier and Maureen Stone},
title={{A tagged-cine MRI investigation of German vowels}},
year=2005,
booktitle={Proc. Interspeech 2005},
pages={2157--2160},
doi={10.21437/Interspeech.2005-437}
}