INTERSPEECH 2013 14thAnnual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association Lyon, France August 25-29, 2013

Observations of Perseverative Coarticulation in Lateral Approximants Using MRI

Nicole Wong, Maojing Fu, Zhi-Pei Liang, Ryan K. Shosted, Bradley P. Sutton

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA

Recent advances in real-time magnetic resonance imaging (rt-MRI) make possible the following study of post-dorsal coarticulatory effects on lateral approximants in running speech. As the MRI is particularly well-suited for investigating pharyngeal articulations, it was capable of capturing perseverative coarticulation from a low central vowel to the immediately following syllable-initial lateral approximant. The lowered and retracted tongue body position associated with a low central vowel is articulatorily equivalent to a pharyngeal constriction. We show here that rt-MRI techniques can track coarticulation direction by calculating the average pixel intensity within a region of interest in MR images as a function of time.

Full Paper

Bibliographic reference.  Wong, Nicole / Fu, Maojing / Liang, Zhi-Pei / Shosted, Ryan K. / Sutton, Bradley P. (2013): "Observations of perseverative coarticulation in lateral approximants using MRI", In INTERSPEECH-2013, 612-616.