Volume 79, Issue 6

Lateral tongue bracing is a lingual posture in which the sides of the tongue are held against the palate and upper molars, and has been observed cross-linguistically. However, it is unknown whether lateral bracing makes adjustments to external perturbation like other body postures. The present study aims to test the robustness of lateral tongue bracing with three experiments. The first baseline experiment was an analysis of an electropalatogram database and the results showed lateral bracing being continuously maintained. The second experiment applied an external perturbation during speech production. A bite block was held between participants’ teeth while intra-oral video was used to record contact between the sides of the tongue and upper molars during speech. The results indicated that lateral bracing was maintained most of the time during speech. The third experiment included simulations investigating the activation of tongue muscles relevant to lateral bracing at different degrees of jaw opening. The results show that bracing requires higher activation of bracing agonists and lower activation of bracing antagonists as jaw opening increases. Our results suggest that lateral tongue bracing is actively maintained and robust under external perturbation and further indicate it serves as an essential lingual posture during speech production.

Uptalk has been increasingly documented in different L1 English varieties and communicative contexts, but is rarely recognized in formal L2 educational contexts, where it is still attributed to learners’ inadequate mastery of intonation. This study is a cross-sectional corpus-based exploration of the phonetic realization of uptalk in Serbian EFL students’ semi-spontaneous expository speech, and its perception as a sentence-finality signal. The corpus comprised all rising intonation units (IU) produced by 14 female and 9 male participants, classified by structural clues as syntactic continuation, listing, polar questions, or uptalk, to explore the relatedness of the phonetic properties to structural position and gender. Next, 100 EFL students rated selected phrases, illustrating continuation rises, uptalk, and final falls, as possibly sentence final, on a 5-point scale. The findings showed that uptalk was consistently produced as a phonetically distinct signal, characterized by a larger pitch excursion, a steeper rise slope, a higher rise peak, and a longer post-IU pause. Females produced wider pitch excursions and steeper slopes. Uptalk examples were ranked high as possible sentence-finality signals. The study suggests that EFL speakers’ uptalk should be recognized as a novel socio-pragmatic prosodic device, deliberately used even in more formal academic contexts.

Phonation and vowel quality are often thought to play a vital role at the initial stage of tonogenesis. This paper investigates the production of voicing and tones in a tonal Northern Kmhmu’ dialect spoken in Nan Province, Thailand, and a non-tonal Eastern Kmhmu’ dialect spoken in Vientiane, Laos, from both acoustic and electroglottographic perspectives. Large and consistent VOT differences between voiced and voiceless stops are preserved in Eastern Kmhmu’, but are not found in Northern Kmhmu’, consistent with previous reports. With respect to pitch, f0 is clearly a secondary property of the voicing contrast in Eastern Kmhmu’, but unquestionably the primary contrastive property in Northern Kmhmu’. Crucially, no evidence is found to suggest that either phonation type or formant differences act as significant cues to voicing in Eastern Kmhmu’ or tones in Northern Kmhmu’. These results suggests that voicing contrasts can also be transphonologized directly into f0-based contrasts, skipping a registral stage based primarily on phonation and/or vowel quality.