Retroflex Consonants Research Articles

Retroflex nasals in the Mai-Ndombe (DRC): The case of nasals in North Boma B82

Retroflex consonants represent a major class of language sounds, but our understanding of their phonetic and phonological behaviour is still relatively limited. From the standpoint of acoustics, recent contributions are largely lacking. Within retroflex consonants, liquids are particularly rare, and arguably very little descriptive and/or theoretical (and/or historical) research has been conducted on them, with a few exceptions for a number of Australian and Indian languages. Bantu languages have mostly been left out of broader surveys, a few cases notwithstanding. In this talk, we show why retroflex nasals could constitute a unique testing ground for phonetics, phonology, typology, and historical linguistics alike. Thanks to recent fieldwork in the Mai-Ndombe region (southwestern DRC), we were able to confirm the existence of nasal retroflexes in North Boma (B82), as initially attested by Stappers (1986). We present an acoustic description of the segments at hand, which represents the first detailed study of this kind for the Bantu languages of the region. We also hypothesise that the presence of retroflexion in the Mai-Ndombe might be a substrate feature originating in extinct hunter-gatherer languages once spoken by groups (known as “Batwa”) which still inhabit the area (Saïdi Hemedi et al., 2012: 3).

Cross-linguistic transfer and ambient phonology

For speech-language pathologists (SLPs) working with multilingual children, differential diagnosis between typical development and speech sound disorder may be complex. This paper presents a longitudinal case study of a bilingual Vietnamese–Australian child (PE) between the ages of 3 years;10 months (3;10) and 6;10, to explore the impact of cross-linguistic transfer and ambient phonology on speech acquisition. PE completed speech assessments as a participant in the VietSpeech Study: the Vietnamese Speech Assessment and the Diagnostic Evaluation of Articulation and Phonology in English. Differential diagnosis based on English speech assessment alone indicated speech sound disorder; yet differential diagnosis based on speech assessment in both languages revealed developmental, cross-linguistic transfer, and ambient phonological influences to be the primary reasons for mismatches. Independent and relational analyses at 3;10 revealed age-appropriate phonetic inventories in Vietnamese and English and bi-directional cross-linguistic transfer: segmental transfer of non-shared consonants, non-shared phonological patterns, and a preference for palatal and retroflex consonants. Contrastive analysis with family members demonstrated the impact of ambient phonology on PE’s speech. Over the three years her speech accuracy improved and mismatches reduced. By 6;10 her English speech was age appropriate and some cross-linguistic transfer was still evident in Vietnamese. Evidence is presented for how dual phonological systems can interact over time until they stabilize. During differential diagnosis, SLPs need to consider the influence of cross-linguistic transfer and ambient phonology on bilingual speech acquisition.

Centralized vowels in Muduga

AbstractProto-Dravidian had a system of ten vowels consisting of five qualities (i, e, a, o, u), each with short and long counterparts. Some South Dravidian languages have expanded systems with innovative vowels that are described as centralized or retroflex. However, the phonetic nature of the vowels, and the list of languages that have them, remain poorly described. We present evidence that Muduga, a South Dravidian language of Kerala, is among the languages with expanded vowel systems. It has five innovative vowel qualities, three of which can be considered phonemic. Historical-comparative evidence indicates that the new qualities result from: (i) retraction of front vowels before retroflex consonants and alveolar /r/; and (ii) fronting of back vowels before alveolar and palatal consonants (except /r/ and /j/). Loss of conditioning consonants in some contexts has led to emergent contrasts. Acoustic phonetic analysis of two male speakers suggests that the new vowels are centralized along the front-back axis, but not retroflex or rhotacized. We compare these results to related developments in other South Dravidian languages and discuss correlations between retroflexion and retraction that motivate the observed patterns.

Voiceless rhotic / retroflex consonants as an areal feature of the Atlantic languages

Voiceless rhotic or retroflex obstruents like [ʈʂ] or [tɹ̥] are rare in Africa, but the existence of a single such sound is relatively common among the Atlantic languages within Niger-Congo. The sound is not a shared retention across languages, but was repeatedly innovated through areal pressure. The sound can furthermore be reconstructed for multiple Atlantic protolanguages, and as such seems to have existed in the area for some time. This paper catalogues the occurrence of this rare sound in Atlantic languages as documented in existing sources, and suggests that due to its persistence in the area through time, it is relatively likely that the most recent common ancestor of the Atlantic languages contained a sound similar to [ʈ] or [ʈʂ], supporting existing proposals which reconstruct such a sound.

Expanding the boundaries of Asian linguistics

AbstractWhile the general lines of the areal linguistic typology of Asia are well known, there are some less well understood pockets that promise to throw light on the overall range of variation within the continent. These include the indigenous languages of the Andaman Islands, which have for much of history stood apart from the population and language spreads that have characterized most of Asia. They fall into two families: Great Andamanese – the focus of this article – and Ongan. In some respects Great Andamanese languages go with the bulk of Asia, e.g. verb-final constituent order, but other aspects even of constituent order represent a mixture that matches neither the general Asian head-final type nor the Southeast Asian head-initial type. Some properties of Great Andamanese are typologically unusual, but do find presumably accidental parallels in languages spoken inside Asia, e.g. retroflex consonants, or elsewhere, e.g. body-part prefixes and verb root ellipsis.

Error Analysis in Chinese Initials Made by Bangladeshi Learners at Elementary Level

Chinese initials play an inevitable role in learning Chinese as a second language. Without the proper knowledge of Chinese initials, learners fail to communicate with people smoothly. Therefore, learners from different countries face different difficulties in learning Chinese initials. The pronunciation of Chinese consonants is not easy for foreigners, especially for Bangladeshi learners. Therefore, errors occur in the Chinese initials of Bangladeshi learners.Although Bangladeshi students often encounter difficulties learning Chinese initials, no comprehensive research done in this area. This research aims to investigate the pronunciation errors of Chinese initials made by Bangladeshi learners. To know the types of initials errors and the reason behind these errors, the error analysis hypothesis, and the contrastive analysis hypothesis was used to analyze the data. However, 20 Bangladeshi students at the elementary level were chosen as the research participants. In this research, a questionnaire survey, interview and comparative analysis were used as research methods.The common finding is that the initials error of Bangladeshi learners occurs in labial, alveolar, velar, retroflex, dental, and palatal consonants. Among them, the highest rate of error has been found in the pronunciation of retroflex, dental, palato-alveolar consonants. The research found that the reason for initials errors of Bangladeshi Chinese learners is the negative transfer of mother tongue, similar phonetic symbols, lack of learning motivation and strategy etc. Finally, the researcher provides some suggestions to correct the pronunciation of initials errors of Bangladeshi Chinese learners.

Trans-vocalic coronal consonant coarticulation in Central Arrernte: An electro-palatographic study

This study examines trans-vocalic CVC coarticulation of the coronal (dental, alveolar, retroflex and (alveo-)palatal) stop, nasal and lateral consonants of Arrernte, an Aboriginal language of Central Australia, using electro-palatographic (EPG) recordings of continuous speech. Coronal consonants are known to be more coarticulatorily resistant than peripheral consonants such as bilabials and velars, and this study teases out the coarticulatory differences between these four coronal places of articulation. Results confirm findings from previous studies that laminal consonants (dental and alveo-palatal) are broadly more coarticulatorily aggressive than apical consonants (alveolars and retroflexes), with the alveolars the least resistant to coarticulation. Dental consonants exert fronting effects on both preceding and following consonants, a result consistent with previous acoustic results for these sounds. Similarly, alveo-palatal consonants show both anticipatory and carryover effects, though their exact coarticulatory effect depends on the affected consonant place and manner. The retroflex consonants exert strong fronting effects on the following consonant, and it is suggested that this is due to the anterior release of retroflexes following ballistic forward movement during closure. There is also some evidence of a retraction effect of retroflexes on preceding consonants. Despite this evidence of coarticulatory aggression, retroflexes are particularly affected by preceding and following palatals: in these cases, the retroflex articulation becomes more forward, and dorsal contact for the retroflex is increased. In sum, by examining speech in an understudied language, we learn that there are still greater complexities in the co-ordination of consonants produced using the tongue tip and blade.

Extracting Phonetic Features From Natural Classes: A Mismatch Negativity Study of Mandarin Chinese Retroflex Consonants.

How speech sounds are represented in the brain is not fully understood. The mismatch negativity (MMN) has proven to be a powerful tool in this regard. The MMN event-related potential is elicited by a deviant stimulus embedded within a series of repeating standard stimuli. Listeners construct auditory memory representations of these standards despite acoustic variability. In most designs that test speech sounds, however, this variation is typically intra-category: All standards belong to the same phonetic category. In the current paper, inter-category variation is presented in the standards. These standards vary in manner of articulation but share a common phonetic feature. In the standard retroflex experimental block, Mandarin Chinese speaking participants are presented with a series of “standard” consonants that share the feature [retroflex], interrupted by infrequent non-retroflex deviants. In the non-retroflex standard experimental block, non-retroflex standards are interrupted by infrequent retroflex deviants. The within-block MMN was calculated, as was the identity MMN (iMMN) to account for intrinsic differences in responses to the stimuli. We only observed a within-block MMN to the non-retroflex deviant embedded in the standard retroflex block. This suggests that listeners extract [retroflex] despite significant inter-category variation. In the non-retroflex standard block, because there is little on which to base a coherent auditory memory representation, no within-block MMN was observed. The iMMN to the retroflex was observed in a late time-window at centro-parieto-occipital electrode sites instead of fronto-central electrodes, where the MMN is typically observed, potentially reflecting the increased difficulty posed by the added variation in the standards. In short, participants can construct auditory memory representations despite significant acoustic and inter-category phonological variation so long as a shared phonetic feature binds them together.

An inductive learning bias toward phonetically driven tonal phonotactics

ABSTRACT In two artificial grammar learning experiments, we tested the learnability of tonal phonotactics forbidding non-domain-final rising tones (*NonFinalR) against the phonotactics banning non-domain-final high-level tones (*NonFinalH). We propose that a firm phonetic ground drives a presumably innate inductive bias favoring *NonFinalR and against *NonFinalH. In Exp. I, we trained two groups of participants with an artificial language conforming to either *NonFinalR or *NonFinalH and tested them with the same set of novel items violating either tonal constraint in an acceptability judgment task. In two separate test sessions, *NonFinalR learners demonstrated a significantly higher consistency in making correct judgments than *NonFinalH learners. In Exp. II, learners participated in the same acceptability judgment task without being exposed to inputs in an a priori training session; participants had to learn from the immediate explicit feedback given to their judgments on every test item. Results suggest that only *NonFinalR learners demonstrated signs of converging on the target tonal phonotactics. In addition, both experiments found that *NonFinalR learners, but not *NonFinalH learners, acquired the tonal phonotactics and a baseline segmental phonotactics prohibiting retroflex consonants similarly. Altogether, the experimental results support the hypothesis of an inductive learning bias toward *NonFinalR and against *NonFinalH.

Dining Across the Decades in Rajasthan, India: A Culminating Feast on a High of Religious Holidays

I tell tales of dining and drinking across three decades in Rajasthan, India, evoking memories of challenge and character defining choices. From whom and with whom I dine or drink proves to be an act expressing relative purity (shuddha) and adherence to principle (dharma). Each heartfelt choice leaves he investigators from a foreign land wondering about consequences upon our stature and rapport for subsequent research. Meanwhile the local community and I research a folk system of knowledge and practice in irrigated farming. Farmers are guardians of a legacy reshaping the landscape to harvest rainfall to recharge the aquifer for lift irrigation. Successful in this arid zone, they want to be heard. A celebratory meal culminates our decade-long endeavor to persuade government administrators, engineers, and hydrologists to listen. In this pluralistic world of multiple castes, classes, and ethnicities, we, prove through our history of dining to be the perfect guests suited for this occasion. The feast is spontaneously arranged, an epiphany arising from our success that day, uniting administrator, researchers, and farmers. So gathered, Hindu, Muslim, Christian, and Jew, we discover how auspicious (shubh) is this moment, occurring on a high holiday according to the calendars of four separate religions. Everything has fallen into place. To quote a saying I heard in my fieldwork: “Shubh āve hae. 11 Words and sentences spoken in Marwari of northwestern Rajasthan are written in italics, with a dash over long vowels, a diacritical dot under retroflex consonants, and aspirations shown by adding “h,” while nasalization are left unrecorded. When “-ji” is added to a personal name it is an honorific often used in conversation. The auspicious happens.” The trajectories of our separate pathways in life have joined, making this the most serendipitous of occasions. By turning the gaze from subjects to our joined intimacy of encounters, I have chosen narrative, rather than a conversation among scholars, to emphasize the primary conceptions underlying everyday concerns and aspirations in South Asian society.

Articulatory and acoustic investigations into gestures of Mandarin retroflex fricatives

This study investigates the inventory and acoustic realizations of articulatory gestures of the Mandarin retroflex (or arguably, post-alveolar) fricative /ʂ/. Tongue shapes were obtained with ultrasound images and categorized as retroflexed or bunched, in light of the literature on the North American English rhotic /ɹ/ production. Velarization, a secondary articulatory gesture of retroflex consonants, was also coded in the ultrasound imaging analysis. Lip rounding, found to be an optional enhancing gesture in Mandarin retroflexion, was identified with lip video data. The acoustic measurements included the spectral center of gravity obtained from the middle of the frication and F2 frequency measured at the onset of the vowel following the fricative. The analyses showed that the spectral center of gravity only varied as a function of the vowel context. F2 at vowel onset was affected by vowel context, velarization and the interaction of vowel context and lip rounding. The preliminary results failed to support previous speculations that the two tongue shapes in Mandarin retroflexes result in different acoustics. We consider including more acoustic measures to further explore the acoustic consequences of articulatory variations in Mandarin retroflex fricatives.This study investigates the inventory and acoustic realizations of articulatory gestures of the Mandarin retroflex (or arguably, post-alveolar) fricative /ʂ/. Tongue shapes were obtained with ultrasound images and categorized as retroflexed or bunched, in light of the literature on the North American English rhotic /ɹ/ production. Velarization, a secondary articulatory gesture of retroflex consonants, was also coded in the ultrasound imaging analysis. Lip rounding, found to be an optional enhancing gesture in Mandarin retroflexion, was identified with lip video data. The acoustic measurements included the spectral center of gravity obtained from the middle of the frication and F2 frequency measured at the onset of the vowel following the fricative. The analyses showed that the spectral center of gravity only varied as a function of the vowel context. F2 at vowel onset was affected by vowel context, velarization and the interaction of vowel context and lip rounding. The preliminary results failed to suppor...

Typological profile of the Great Andamanese family

Abstract Great Andamanese constitutes alongside Ongan one of the two indigenous language families of the Andaman Islands. The phonological typology of the Great Andamanese languages includes a number of features of areal interest, including retroflex consonants (characteristic of South Asia) and lack of phonemic fricatives (reconstructed for Proto-Dravidian). Its morphosyntactic typology has some unremarkable features from a global typological perspective, such as verb-final clause order combined with postpositions and possessor-before-possessed but with postnominal attributive adjectives, alongside highly unusual features such as: somatic prefixes; several series of personal pronouns whose choice depends not only on grammatical relation/semantic role but also, for instance, on clause type; negation of a verbal clause by expressing it as the non-finite subject of a negative copular clause; and root ellipsis.

Articulatory variations of Mandarin retroflex consonants produced by second language speakers: An electromagnetic articulograph study

This study investigated articulatory variations in tongue positions and shapes during the production of Mandarin post-alveolar retroflex consonants produced by speakers with varying Mandarin proficiency (native Mandarin speakers, Japanese L2 speakers of Mandarin, and Japanese monolinguals with no knowledge of Mandarin). We aimed to examine (1) whether there are articulatory variations for Mandarin retroflex consonants and (2) if preferred variations differ across groups. Speakers either read aloud or imitated the consonants after hearing them and their tongue positions and shapes were measured by electromagnetic articulography (WAVE, NDI). Results showed that there are multiple articulatory variations for Mandarin retroflex consonants. Native Mandarin speakers produced a concave or convex tongue shape; all Japanese L2 speakers of Mandarin produced a convex tongue shape. In contrast, the majority of Japanese monolinguals imitated the sounds with an entirely different tongue position: bunching their tongues in the middle, which somewhat resembled the “bunched” rhotic in American English. Despite these articulatory variations, productions by most L2 speakers and several monolinguals were successfully identified as retroflex consonants by native Mandarin listeners. These results suggest that L2 speakers may prefer certain articulatory variations and the preference may change depending on proficiency.

Retroflex consonant harmony: An areal feature in South Asia

Abstract Retroflexion is a well-known areal feature of South Asia. Most South Asian languages, regardless of their genetic affiliation, contrast retroflex consonants with their non-retroflex dental counterparts. However, South Asian languages differ in the phonotactic restrictions that they place on retroflex consonants. This paper presents evidence that a large number of South Asian languages have developed a co-occurrence restriction on coronal obstruents that can be described as retroflex consonant harmony. In these languages, roots containing two non-adjacent coronal stops are primarily limited to those with two dentals (T…T) or two retroflexes (Ṭ…Ṭ), while those containing a combination of dental and retroflex stops are avoided (*T…Ṭ, *Ṭ…T). Historical-comparative evidence indicates that long-distance retroflex assimilation has contributed to the development of this phonotactic pattern (T…Ṭ → Ṭ…Ṭ). In addition, the paper demonstrates that the distribution of languages with and without retroflex consonant harmony is geographic in nature, not genetic. Retroflex consonant harmony is characteristic of most languages in the northern half of the South Asian subcontinent, regardless of whether they are Indo-Aryan, Dravidian or Munda (but not Tibeto-Burman). It is not characteristic of Indo-Aryan and Dravidian languages in the south. Thus, retroflex consonant harmony constitutes an areal feature within South Asia.

On distinguishing articulatory configurations and articulatory tasks: Tamil retroflex consonants

Speech production can be described in multiple coordinate frames: articulatory configurations, gestural tasks, and acoustic patterns. Examination of the achievement of retroflex stops and liquids in Tamil suggests that we must consider separately the gestural task of apical pre-palatal constriction and the articulatory maneuver to achieve the task. The maneuver of the tongue during retroflex consonants varies across vowel contexts. Specifically, in the symmetrical intervocalic contexts between back vowels /a/ and /u/, an apical pre-palatal constriction is achieved by curling back the tongue. In the context of high front vowel /i/, a laminal pre-palatal constriction is achieved by bunching the tongue. However, the location of retroflex consonant constriction within the vocal tract is consistent across all of these vowel contexts, suggesting that the constriction task remains the same. Variation in the articulatory configuration of the retroflex in the two contexts was quantified through Gaussian curvature functions at fourteen points along the tongue, sampled at evenly spaced points throughout the vocal tract, on every other gridline of a polar-rectangular grid in every frame in each utterance. The empirical results support the notion that the articulatory configuration coordinate frame and the gestural task frame provide separate, but related, descriptions of speech production.

Retroflex variation and methodological issues: A reply to Simonsen, Moen, and Cowen (2008)

We argue that the differences in the articulation of Norwegian retroflex consonants described by Simonsen, Moen, and Cowen (2008) as individual variation may instead be due to factors such as individual and dialectal background, rather than variation across a single variety. Our main argument is based on existing dialect literature and speech corpus data, which show that the phonemes involved in the retroflexion process are not present in the same linguistic contexts in all dialects. SMC's experimental stimuli and conditions include linguistic contexts which do not necessarily induce retroflexion naturally, and therefore cannot be relied upon to provide an accurate picture of retroflexion in natural speech contexts. The peculiar retroflex pronunciation that can be heard in some of SMC's sound files may be due to the invasive intra-oral equipment or to the unnatural retroflexion contexts introduced by their stimuli.

Jaw movement and coronal stop spectra in Central Arrernte

This paper presents jaw movement data from two female speakers of Central Arrernte, focusing on the four coronal places of articulation (dental, alveolar, retroflex and alveo-palatal) across stop, nasal and lateral manners of articulation. It also presents spectral burst data for the stop consonants. Results suggest that when there is a clear spectral peak for the release burst, as is the case primarily for the alveo-palatal, but also for the alveolar and retroflex, the jaw remains high at stop release; but when the spectral burst has a relatively diffuse spectrum, as is the case for the dental, the jaw begins to lower before stop release in anticipation of the following vowel. In addition, there is evidence that the highest jaw target for the alveo-palatal is timed not for the release of the stop closure, but for the frication portion which follows. These results are interpreted as lending support for the view that the lower teeth play a role in stop burst release, similar to their role in sibilant fricative production. Finally, with regard to the retroflex consonants, there is evidence that the continuous upwards jaw movement during acoustic closure is associated with a low jaw position for the initial posterior placement of the tongue tip, followed by a final high jaw position at the anterior release of the tongue tip closure. These results support the view that both biomechanical and acoustic considerations play a role in speech planning and coarticulation.

Indexical perception in Chinese: The influence of first‐language (L1) Taiwanese on second‐language (L2) Mandarin.

A pilot study on indexical perception in Chinese hypothesized that L1 Taiwanese speakers’ L2 Mandarin production could be detected as having a nonnative accent. If the nonnative accent was detectable, what phonetic properties (the phonetics of consonants or vowels, or the prosody) did L1 Taiwanese speakers’ Mandarin exhibit such that these attributes entailed indexical information? Additionally, the study argued that L1 Mandarin speakers would show higher sensitivity to the nonnative accent than L1 Taiwanese speakers. The results have shown that only in sentence production, the sentences being either low‐pass filtered or unfiltered, could the L1 Taiwanese talkers be possibly indexed correctly. It was also found that the listeners perceived more accurately when they encountered retroflex stimuli in monosyllabic word condition. Based on these findings, it was concluded that the prosody and the retroflex consonants seemed to reveal much of the talker’s L1 information. However, concerning the hypothesis that L1 Mandarin speakers were more sensitive to the nonnative accent, the results did not support this. The findings in this pilot study are preliminary, given the fact that the corpus was small. A bigger‐scale study is being carried out to gain more insights into indexical perception in Chinese.

Norwegian retroflex stops in a cross linguistic perspective

In this paper, Norwegian retroflex stops are investigated through the combined use of electropalatography (EPG) and electromagnetic articulography (EMA), with extensive and detailed data from four informants. Cross linguistic investigations have shown considerable articulatory variation in retroflex consonants regarding both place of articulation and tongue configuration, making it difficult to establish common articulatory characteristics for these consonants. Through our detailed articulatory investigation, we were able to identify one characteristic only that was always present in retroflex stops in Norwegian, namely an apical articulation. Other characteristics often found in retroflexes, like a posterior place of articulation, a bending up (retroflexion) of the tongue tip, a flat tongue middle, and a forward movement of the tongue tip after the release of the stop (‘flapping out’), were found only in some contexts or in some individuals. Overall, the extensive articulatory variation in retroflexes often found in languages with relatively small inventories of coronal consonants was confirmed in our data.

The historical development of retroflex consonants in Indo-Aryan

In the development of Indo-Aryan the palatoalveolar sibilant < became retroflex s by a context-free sound change. While most scholars assume this development, no satisfactory explanation for its occurrence has been proposed. The present study is an attempt to account for why s became s: the claim will be made that this context-free sound change occurred as a repair mechanism to avoid a phonemic inventory that is otherwise unattested in natural languages.