The lingual topography of American English laterals in onsets and codas

Abstract

This paper reports on a three-dimensional/four-dimensional ultrasound investigation of American English laterals. Traditional descriptions of English distinguish between pre-vocalic (onset) laterals (‘light-l’), said to involve a coronal gesture creating an alveolar occlusion on the center line with lateral venting, and post-vocalic (coda) laterals (‘dark-l’), said to involve both the coronal gesture and an additional dorsal constriction gesture. Recent work suggests that this view of laterals may be overly simple: e.g., onset laterals in American English may also have a dorsal gesture [Rhodes et al., JASA137(4), 2268–2269 (2015)]. Previous work also noted a persistent tongue configuration involving deep cupping of the midline in the palatal region yielding a raised tongue tip and dorsum around the cupped region. This configuration appears in both onsets and codas, even for a speaker who exhibited no coronal contact [Berkson et al., ICASSP (2017), pp. 5080–5084]. This study presents configurations for 20 college-aged native speakers of English (10 female) who show individual differences in (i) the presence of palatal grooving and (ii) consistency between onset and coda configurations. We contend that the onset versus coda lateral distinction cannot be reduced to a single description in terms of lingual configuration.