An MRI-based articulatory characterization of Kannada coronal consonant contrasts
Résumé
This paper investigates production mechanisms of a complex set of coronal consonant contrasts in Kannada, with the goals of (i) testing previous theoretical distinctive feature approaches to coronals and (ii) documenting this relatively phonetically under-studied Dravidian language. An extensive corpus of articulations was collected by static MRI midsagittal from two female speakers, including a full set of Kannada place and manner contrasts in five vowel contexts. Articulatory modelling was used to determine a small set of components responsible for the implementation of various consonant classes, including the place sets of dentals, retroflexes, and alveolopalatals, and manner sets of stops, fricatives, nasals, liquids, and glides. Overlaid average contours were used for the traditional phonetic classification of consonants, while dispersion ellipses were employed to capture consonants' susceptibility to vowel coarticulation. The results provide evidence for some of the distinctive feature characterizations of coronals (e.g. constriction location and tongue body height distinctions for dentals and retroflexes), while disconfirming others (tongue dorsum backing for retroflexes). They also largely confirm previous descriptive phonetic accounts of Kannada consonants (including the merger of retroflex and alveolopalatal sibilants), while at the same time identifying somewhat unexpected articulatory patterns (such as dorsal constrictions for /ʋ/, /h/, and /r/). All the images and articulatory contours are made publicly available.
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