Does vowel inventory or inventory size condition the articulation of /i/ and /y/?

Abstract

Wood [J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 80, 391–401 (1986)] and dispersion‐focalization theory (DFT) [Schwartz et al., J. Phonetics 25, 255–86 (1997)] have made differing predictions about variation in the articulation of /i/ and /y/. Wood claimed that there are “language‐specific tendencies to either prepalatal or midpalatal tongue positions for palatal vowels … languages contrasting [i] with [y] preferring the prepalatal position for both vowels” [Wood (1986), p. 392]. However, DFT predicts that the high‐front vowel /i/ is always driven to near the high‐front corner of the acoustic space in order to maximize perceptual‐acoustic distinctness from the rest of the vowels in the inventory of the language. In addition, it is possible that languages with smaller vowel inventories have less extreme articulations for “corner” vowels such as /i/ and /y/ overall. In this study, we compare articulatory measures of constriction location, extent, and degree in four languages (with /y/ versus without /y/ and small inventory versus large inventory).