Electropalatographic specification of Croatian fricatives /s/ and /z/

Self-perception of tongue tip constriction in alveolar fricatives produced by young women with and without normal tongue positioning

PURPOSE

This study investigated the self-perception of 49 women, monolingual speakers of Brazilian Portuguese, about their tongue position for the alveolar articulation of the fricatives [s] and [z].

METHODS

The video recording of speech samples of these 49 women (ages 18 to 28) were analyzed by three Speech-Language Pathologists. They were classified into two groups: Group 1 (G1, n=25), with no alterations in the tongue position during the production of [s] and [z], and Group 2 (G2, n=24), with alterations in the tongue position during the production of [s] and [z]. The tongue position self-perception experiment required the participants to identify the specific tongue constriction point in the production of [s] and [z] (apical, laminal, or "other") during the reading of 24 words and 24 pseudowords. The Friedman test, with posterior paired comparisons, was used for the intragroup analysis. The Mann-Whitney test was used for intergroup comparisons. The statistical significance adopted was 5% (p<0.05).

RESULTS

G1 reported apical and laminal tongue constrictions while GE reported these constrictions plus other tongue adjustments. The presence of other tongue adjustments differentiated the groups, G1 and G2 (p=0,002). There were significant differences between [s] and [z] for G1, with the laminal position occurring more often in [s] compared to [z].

CONCLUSION

Women with and without alteration in the tongue position reported apical and laminal constrictions. Howerer, other tongue adjustments were self-perceived in the presence of altered tongue position.

Tongue-Palate Contact Timing during /s/ and /z/ in English

Although numerous studies have investigated supraglottal strategies for signalling voicing in fricatives, there is still no agreement about the precise characteristics of tongue-to-palate contact timing during voiced as opposed to voiceless fricatives. In this study we use electropalatography (EPG) to investigate articulatory and coarticulatory characteristics of tongue-to-palate contact timing during /s/ and /z/ in English. Five typically speaking participants, speakers of Southern British English, produced 500 trochaic words containing the intervocalic alveolar fricatives /s/ or /z/. The time between the start of the frication and the maximum contact at the place of articulation was expressed as a percentage of each fricative's total duration (time to target, TT).This measure was used to analyse articulatory and coarticulatory timing during /s/ and /z/. Data for absolute timing were also presented. The results showed that the time between the start of the frication and the maximum contact point was longer for /s/ than for /z/. This difference was consistent across speakers but was not significant for all of them. The results of the coarticulatory effects showed that the influence of vowel context on TT values for /s/ and /z/ did not differ significantly, but there was a tendency for /z/ to be more resistant to coarticulation effects than /s/.