Govor, Vol. 40 No. 2, 2023.
Original scientific paper
https://doi.org/10.22210/govor.2023.40.09
Tongue pivoting in Croatian cochlear implant users
Nina Nodilo
orcid.org/0009-0009-0374-7859
Marko Liker
; Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Zagreb
Abstract
Pivoting is a vertical movement of the tongue around a relatively stable central point, which occurs at the overlap of articulatory gestures due to articulatory constraints and coarticulatory resistances. The pivot is considered to be one of the basic global kinematic patterns in the movement of the tongue during speech production. The purpose of the pivoting gesture is often linked with the articulatory transparency of the speech signal. The aim of this paper was to investigate pivoting in the speech of prelingually deaf cochlear implant users. Participants were adult native speakers of Croatian. We hypothesized that the number and the characteristics of pivots would not depend on the clinical status of the participants and that the number of pivots, as well as the position of the pivot point would depend on the phonetic context. The analyzed materials in this study are part of the KROKO corpus, which was an instrumental investigation of coarticulation in the speech of typical and atypical speakers of Croatian. Pivoting was analyzed via ultrasound tongue imaging and speech material comprised of words recorded in a quasi-spontaneous communicative situation. Pivots were analysed in vowels [i], [a], and [u] surrounded by the fricative [ʃ]. This phonetic context enabled us to examine the pivot pattern in different coarticulatory conditions. The following variables were analyzed: number of pivots, pivot duration, pivot strength, and the position of the pivot point. 64 pivots were found in the recorded material, which indicates that cochlear implant users produce pivot patterns in their coarticulatory strategies. The results showed that the number of pivots depended on the type of vowel, but the position of the pivot point did not. The stability of the position of the pivot point was discussed in the context of coarticulatory resistance of the tongue tip in fricative-vowel coarticulation. The pivot strength depended on the clinical status of the participants, which could point to a different organization of articulatory gestures in prelingually deaf speakers when compared with typical speakers.
Keywords
tongue pivoting; coarticulation; cochlear implant users; articulatory gestures; Croatian
Hrčak ID:
314511
URI
Publication date:
22.2.2024.
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