Electropalatographic Study Of English Consonants

Like form and meaning, sound is also one of the threes key elements of language. Many languages exist without a writing system; however, there is no single language without sounds. Consonants, like vowels, are an indispensible part of speech; and they are usually studied from aspects of speech organs and speech manners. We have gone a long way to get a comprehensive understanding of speech organs. Since many speech organs are in the mouth, the invisibility of these speech organs has been an obstacle for our understanding and study of speech production. Scholars have been striving to make these transient phonetic events visible and within our touch. Lingual-palatal contact is very important for the understanding of speech production and the very study of lingual-palatal contact has also gone a very long road. Thanks to the development of modern science and technology, devices for such study have been well developed. Among them is electropalatograph (EPG), which helps us to trace the real-time lingual-palatal contact in speech production. Inserted into the mouth of the speaker, once wired to a computer, a customer-fitted pseudo-palate of less than 0.5mm in thickness is ready to record the lingual contact information all along with audio signals. This technology has been widely used in phonetics, language teaching and linguistic pathology. The author analyzes the electropalatographic data available form 15 English consonants ([t d s z n l r t d j k g ]) so as to have a close look at the characteristics of the involved speech organs. These 15 targeted English consonants are studied in the context of vowels with [?] as the preceding vowel and one of the [i uɑ]as the vowel followed the targeted consonant. The author has successfully obtained lingual-palatal contact diagrams including frames with 10 ms interval and cumulative contact diagrams. The former ones can be used to study the contact modes at the 3 stages of consonant production. The latter ones show cumulative contact of targeted consonants in percentage or shades of colors, and all available data are reliable information for categorization of targeted consonants. The author also transforms the contact data into 3 indexes: center of gravity (CoG), contact anteriority (CA) and contact centrality (CC). By using CoG, the author has successfully analyzed the changes and differences of contact patterns of all the 15 targeted consonants in the context of vowels. Based on CA and CC, the author has also drawn 15 diagrams of contact variants for precise description of target consonants, and these data are used to indicate the range of contact variants for these targeted consonants. All of these analyses will help us to better the understanding of English consonants in terms of speech organs, and is of great importance for consonants study and speech acquisition.