Labial Consonants Research Articles

Electromyographic Study of the Tones of Thai

In our desire to study the effects of laryngeal muscle activity on the rather complex use of fundamental frequency changes in a tone language, we have done an electromyographic analysis of the production of the tones of Thai. We chose the Thai language because its five phonemic tones differentiate words primarily by means of characteristic f0 contours. In the experiment, we asked four native speakers to say 45 short sentences. Included in this list were the five tones in nine contexts: the three long vowels /aa ii uu/ and the three labial consonants /b p ph/. Our findings indicate that for all four speakers, the activity of the cricothyroid muscle increases with the raising of f0, and the activity of the strap muscles—the sternohyoid, sternothyroid, and thyrohyoid muscles—increases with the lowering of f0. [This research was supported by the National Institute of Dental Research, NIH Grant.]

A high-speed radiographic cephalometric analysis of mandibular movements during the pronunciation of certain labial consonants by adults with normal speech: By Martin S. Goldberg, Northwestern University, Chicago, Illinois

A high-speed radiographic cephalometric analysis of mandibular movements during the pronunciation of certain labial consonants by adults with normal speech: By Martin S. Goldberg, Northwestern University, Chicago, Illinois