The acoustics and articulation of mandarin sibilants: Improving our data by modeling the palate with EMA
Chris Neufeld, Andrei V. Anghelescu · Canadian acoustics · 2011
Electromagnetic articulography (EMA) is a tool for tracking the motion of the articulators during speech. Mandarin has a three-way place contrast for sibilants: alveolar, palatal and retmflex. For each place there are three possible manners of articulation: fricatives, unaspirated aifricates and aspirated aifricates. Place of articulation (PoA) of Mandarin Sibilants is readily distinguished by peak COG. For all manners of articulation, alveolar sibilants had the highest COG, retroflex the lowest, and palatal in the middle. Manner of articulation is distinguished by the relative time of the COG peak. The constriction location (cl) and constriction degree (cd) of the tongue tip (TT) and tongue body (TB) coils were calculated using this model. At each sample, the shortest line in the sagittal plane between the tongue coil and the palate model was found.