Abstract
Lateral bracing refers to an intentional tongue posture whereby the sides of the tongue make contact with the sides of the palate and the upper molars. While previous research on this topic has focused mostly on English, the present study tests the hypothesis that lateral bracing provides a fundamental postural basis for speech and is present across languages. We predicted that, across multiple languages, the sides of the tongue should be more stable than the center and should stay in a relatively high position in the mouth throughout most of running speech. Using coronal ultrasound imaging, we measured tongue movement produced by speakers (N = 28) of six languages (Akan, Cantonese, English, Korean, Mandarin and Spanish). Across these languages, as predicted, the sides of the tongue throughout running speech were positioned higher in the mouth than the center, and the range of movement of the sides was significantly smaller than that of the center of the tongue. These findings support the view that the sides of the tongue maintain a braced posture across languages while speaking, potentially constituting a universal, rather than language-specific, postural basis for speech.
Highlights
Tongue BRACING is a term used to describe postures in which the tongue is held in contact with surrounding hard surfaces, including the palate and/or teeth (e.g. Stone 1990)
We propose to test the presence of lateral bracing using ultrasound imaging
intersextile range (ISR) represents the range of the center 68% of tongue vertical location distribution
Summary
Tongue BRACING is a term used to describe postures in which the tongue is held in contact with surrounding hard surfaces, including the palate and/or teeth (e.g. Stone 1990). Previous research has documented tongue–palate contact in speech, often with a focus on specific speech sounds. Many of these studies have focused on English, and most have used palatography and electropalatography (EPG). McLeod (2006) and McLeod, Roberts & Sita (2006) used EPG to show lateral bracing during the productions of /s/, /z/ and /n/ for Australian English speakers. Gick et al.’s (2017) study of archival EPG data on English found that lateral tongue bracing was maintained throughout more than 97% of continuous speech. Though lateral bracing has been demonstrated in English in phrase-level and continuous speech (Bressmann et al 2010, Gick et al 2017, Lulich & Pearson 2019), and has been observed to be pervasive across most sounds (Bressmann et al 2010, Gick et al 2017), bracing has only been demonstrated for other languages at the level of individual speech sounds
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