Shaw Jason A, Chen Wei-Rong, Proctor Michael I, Derrick Donald
University of Western Sydney, Australia.
National Tsing Hua University, Hsinchu City, Taiwan.
J Speech Lang Hear Res. 2016 Dec 1;59(6):S1566-S1574. doi: 10.1044/2015_JSLHR-S-15-0031.
Models of speech production often abstract away from shared physiology in pitch control and lingual articulation, positing independent control of tone and vowel units. We assess the validity of this assumption in Mandarin Chinese by evaluating the stability of lingual articulation for vowels across variation in tone.
Electromagnetic articulography was used to track flesh points on the tongue (tip, body, dorsum), lips, and jaw while native Mandarin speakers (n = 6) produced 3 vowels, /pa/, /pi/, /pu/, combined with 4 Mandarin tones: T1 "high," T2 "rising," T3 "low," and T4 "falling."
Consistent with physiological expectations, tones that begin low, T2 and T3, conditioned a lower position of the tongue body for the vowel /a/. For the vowel /i/, we found the opposite effect, whereby tones that begin low, T2 and T3, conditioned a higher tongue body position.
The physiology of pitch control exerts systematic variation on the lingual articulation of /a/ across tones. The effects of tone on /i/ articulation are in the opposite direction predicted by physiological considerations. Physiologically arbitrary variation of the type observed for /i/ challenges the assumption that phonetic patterns can be determined by independent control of tone (source) and vowel (filter) production units.
言语产生模型通常忽略音高控制和舌部发音中的共同生理机制，假定声调单元和元音单元是独立控制的。我们通过评估不同声调下元音舌部发音的稳定性，来检验这一假设在汉语普通话中的有效性。
当以普通话为母语的人（n = 6）发出3个元音/pa/、/pi/、/pu/并结合4种汉语声调：阴平（高平调）、阳平（高升调）、上声（降升调）、去声（全降调）时，使用电磁关节造影术追踪舌头（舌尖、舌体、舌背）、嘴唇和下颌上的标记点。
与生理预期一致，起始音较低的声调，即阳平和上声，使得元音/a/的舌体位置较低。对于元音/i/，我们发现了相反的效果，即起始音较低的声调，即阳平和上声，使得舌体位置较高。
音高控制的生理机制在不同声调下对/a/的舌部发音产生系统性变化。声调对/i/发音的影响与生理因素预测的方向相反。在/i/中观察到的这种生理上任意的变化挑战了语音模式可以由声调（声源）和元音（滤波器）产生单元的独立控制来决定的假设。
