| The research on the articulatory features of speech sounds and their variation is an important but also challenging project in the study of speech production. The articulatory processes of consonants are especially complicated, which involve the rapid and coordinated movements of various articulators. The present paper attempts to examine tentatively the articulatory processes of consonants in Standard Chinese by using EPG The major purposes are 1) to test the descriptions in traditional phonetic study about the place of articulation of consonants, and 2) to observe the way consonant articulation co-varies with adjacent vowels.In the traditional phonetic study of Standard Chinese, researchers describe the consonants in terms of the place and manner of articulation, mainly depending on their subjective perception of speech sounds. Traditional phonetic study laid the foundation for our knowledge about consonants, but the descriptions about the articulatory processes may not be precise. Modern instruments of experimental phonetics allow experimental study of the acoustic and physiological properties of speech sounds. The physiological instruments like EPG (electropalatography) and EMA (electromagnetic articulography) make it possible to take an insight into the dynamic processes of speech articulation.Since the 1930s, experimental study of phonetics has begun to flourish in Standard Chinese. Researchers examined the quality, intensity, pitch and duration of the consonants by means of acoustic approaches. As far as physiological studies are concerned, the voiced and aspirated features attracted the most attention in the early studies. When x-ray and palatography were applied to phonetic studies, researchers were able to take the images of the tongue configuration and the location and degree of tongue-palate contact in the articulation of sound segments. (For a review of the acoustic and articulatory studies of consonants in Standard Chinese, see Wu Zongji ( ), 1989)Useful as they were, x-ray and palatography allowed only static examination of the articulation of sound segments in Standard Chinese. But consonant articulation, as we know, involves a rapidly moving progress of various articulators. No static approach can fully reveal its properties. As the development of modern science and technology, we now have more instruments, like EMA and EPG to record the dynamic progresses of consonant articulation.Segments are produced in a continuum in natural speech, rather than orderly sequenced in distinct sounds as listeners perceive them. During speech the movements of different articulators for the production of successive phonetic segments overlap in time and interact with one another. As a consequence, the vocal tract configuration at any point in time is influenced by more than one segment. This is what the term "coarticulation" describes. In connected speech, the articulatory movements required for one gesture are often anticipated during the production of a preceding gesture (i.e., anticipatory coarticulation); likewise, the articulatory requirements of one gesture are often carried over during the production of the following gesture (i.e., carryover coarticulation). Traditional phonetic studies in Standard Chinese have noticed the variation in segmental articulation. For example, the /d/* in /wo#de/ ( )tend to be voiced; the /n/ in /mian#bao/ ( ) tend to be assimilated by /m/; etc. Experimental studies of segmental variation in Standard Chinese also appear in recent years ( , 1989; 2003; etc.). But systematic studies in this aspect are still to be carried out.Studies on the coarticulation of speech sounds in foreign languages are abundant, but there is no agreement in the theoretical account of coarticulation. Early studies attribute coarticulation to a purely physiological process due to mechanical inertia. Lindblom (1963) tried to explain vowel reduction by means of "principle of economy"."Feature-spreading" and "coproduction" are two main perspectives proposed in the' The slashes are use... |
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