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home / papers / 2016 / Etude par EMA des mouvements de la mâchoire inférieure durant les consonnes de l'arabe marocain (EMA study of jaw movements during Moroccan Arabic consonants)

Etude par EMA des mouvements de la mâchoire inférieure durant les consonnes de l'arabe marocain (EMA study of jaw movements during Moroccan Arabic consonants)

Paper · 2016 · Chakir Zeroual, Philip Hoole and Adamantios Gafos

Summary

This phonetics study asks how actively the lower jaw takes part in producing Moroccan Arabic consonants. It tests four claims from earlier work: salient friction noise in coronals requires a very high jaw; apicals use a lower jaw than laminals; retracting the tongue root needs jaw lowering; and gutturals involve no active jaw gesture. Native speakers were recorded with 3D electromagnetic articulography (EMA, AG500). Real verbs and a few nonwords were placed in a fixed carrier sentence, with each consonant in symmetric aCa and iCi contexts. Vertical and horizontal jaw positions were measured at the consonant midpoint and analysed with ANOVA and Tukey HSD tests. The jaw is high and stable for coronal obstruents, including emphatic (pharyngealized) ones, even when they are apical. Pharyngeals and laryngeals show no evidence of active jaw control, which supports Goldstein. Vertical and horizontal jaw displacements do not always co-vary, so jaw motion is more than a simple rotation. The work adds rare articulatory data on post-velar consonants.

Key points

  • Data come from an AG500 EMA system (Carstens Medizinelektronik), with sensors on the tongue tip, mid-tongue, tongue dorsum, both lips and the lower incisors. Four speakers were recorded, but the analysis uses 3 speakers × 5 repetitions per item.
  • Fifteen consonants were studied: labial, coronal (plain and emphatic), velar, uvular, pharyngeal and laryngeal. Verbs had the shapes /ma+CaC+ʃ/ and /yCiC/ inside the frame "he told him __ here".
  • Kinematic landmarks were found automatically with Mview (M. Tiede, Haskins), using a 20% velocity threshold.
  • Jaw height depended on consonant identity (F(14,420)=37.1) and on vowel context (F(1,420)=62.7), and the two interacted. For horizontal position, the interaction was not significant (p=0.23).
  • /t d T D s S/ share the same high jaw position. /l r/ have a lower jaw that does not differ significantly from /k g/. Emphatics match their plain counterparts in jaw height, so tongue-root retraction does not require jaw lowering.

Interesting ideas

  • I1. The authors judge whether an articulator is "actively involved" by comparing categories in identical contexts and by how strongly the articulator follows neighbouring vowels; heavy dependence on context signals that no target is specified.
  • I2. Hypotheses from earlier literature are turned into explicit, falsifiable contrasts (apical vs laminal, emphatic vs plain) and tested pair by pair with post-hoc tests, rather than through one global score.
  • I3. A fixed carrier sentence with symmetric contexts holds prosody and position constant, so differences can be attributed to the item under study.
  • I4. The study tests two dimensions separately instead of assuming one underlying parameter, and finds they are not always coupled, which rules out a single-rotation model.
  • I5. Event boundaries are located by a reproducible rule, a percentage of peak velocity, rather than by hand labelling.

For Mova

How these ideas could serve Mova, our small open language model — its files, stages and tests:

  • I1 (tokens): A morphological feature could be treated as lexically specified only if its value stays stable across contexts, and as contextually derived if it simply tracks its neighbours.
  • I2 (learn): Evaluation could be organised as targeted contrast pairs, such as an active/passive or dative-shift pair, each with its own significance check, so that a failure points to a specific phenomenon.
  • I3 (answer): Probing readers with a fixed template and swapping only one entity or verb would isolate what actually changes the answer, much like a negative control.
  • I4 (world): Entity states such as quantity, location and ownership should be tracked as independent dimensions rather than collapsed into a single scale assumed to move together.
  • I5 (world): Event onsets and offsets in narrative timelines could be fixed by explicit threshold rules over cues, which keeps the ordering of events explainable and repeatable.

Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.

 Fields, topics and concepts

📚 Shelves 6The field of science this work belongs to (OpenAlex fields).Arts and Humanities · 17,450 worksLanguage and Linguistics · 17,296 worksPsychology · 1,649 worksExperimental and Cognitive Psychology · 930 worksMedicine · 275 worksPhysiology · 35 works

🧭 Topics 1Research subjects and languages the work is about.Semitic languages · 3,066 works

Cite

Cite as Chakir Zeroual, Philip Hoole and Adamantios Gafos. 2016. Etude par EMA des mouvements de la mâchoire inférieure durant les consonnes de l'arabe marocain (EMA study of jaw movements during Moroccan Arabic consonants). Actes de la conférence conjointe JEP-TALN-RECITAL 2016. volume 1 : JEP.

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work.

@inproceedings{zeroual2016etude,
  title = {{Etude par EMA des mouvements de la mâchoire inférieure durant les consonnes de l'arabe marocain (EMA study of jaw movements during Moroccan Arabic consonants)}},
  author = {Chakir Zeroual, Philip Hoole and Adamantios Gafos},
  booktitle = {Actes de la conférence conjointe JEP-TALN-RECITAL 2016. volume 1 : JEP},
  year = {2016},
  url = {https://aclanthology.org/2016.jeptalnrecital-jep.36/}
}

References

16 references, 0 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet.

  1. DART S. (1991). “Articulatory and acoustic properties of apical and laminal articulations,” UCLA Working Papers in Phonetics 79, 1–155. find
  2. ELGENDY A.M. (1999). Jaw contribution to the timing control of pharyngeal consonants production. Proc. of the XIV th ICPhS, San Francisco: 2415-2418. find
  3. GOLDSTEIN L. (1994). Possible articulatory bases for the class of guttural consonants. In P. Keating (ed.) Phonological Structure and Phonetic Form: Papers in Laboratory Phonology III. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 234-241. find
  4. HOOLE, P. & KÜHNERT, B. (1996). Tongue-jaw coordination in German vowel production. Proc. of the 4th Speech Production Seminar, Autrans, 97-100. find
  5. JAKOBSON, R. (1962). Muffxxama, the 'emphatic' phonemes in Arabic. In E. Pulgram (ed.). Studies presented to Jushua Whatmough on his 60th Birthday. The Hague: Mouton.105-115. find
  6. KEATING P., LINDBLOM B., LUBKER J., and KREIMAN J. (1994). “Variability in jaw height for segments in English and Swedish VCVs,” J. Phonetics 22, 407–422. find
  7. LEE S.H. (1995). Orals, gutturals, and the jaw. In B. Connell and A. Arvaniti (eds.). Phonology and phonetic evidence: Papers in Laboratory Phonology IV. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. find
  8. LINDBLOM B. (1983). Economy of speech gestures. In P.F. MacNeilage (ed.), The Production of Speech, 217-245. New York: Springer. find
  9. MOOSHAMMER C. HOOLE P. & GEUMANN A. (2007). Jaw and order, Language Speech50, 145-76. find
  10. MOOSHAMMER C., HOOLE P., GEUMANN A. (2006). Interarticulator cohesion within coronal consonant production. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 120, 1028-1039. find
  11. NOLAN, F. (1995). The role of the jaw active or passive?. In B. Connell & A. Arvaniti (eds.). Phonology and Phonetic Evidence: Papers in Laboratory Phonology IV. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. find
  12. RECASENS D. (2012). A study of jaw coarticulatory resistance and aggressiveness for Catalan consonants and vowels. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 132, 412-420. find
  13. SHADLE C. (1985). The acoustics of Fricative Consonants. PhD. Thesis MIT. find
  14. ZEROUAL C., HOOLE P., FUCHS S., ESLING J.H. (2007). EMA study of the coronal emphatic and non-emphatic plosive consonants of Moroccan Arabic. Proc. of the XVI th ICPhS, Saarbrücken: 397-340. find
  15. ZEROUAL C, HOOLE P, and ESLING J.H. (2011a). Contraintes articulatoires et acoustico-perceptives liées à la production de /k/ emphatisée en arabe marocain. In M. Embarki and C. Dodane (eds.), La Coarticulation. Des indices à la représentation, 227-240. Paris : L'Harmattan. find
  16. ZEROUAL C, ESLING J.H, HOOLE P, and RIDOUANE R. (2011). Ultrasound study of Moroccan Arabic labiovelarization. Proc. of the XVII th ICPhS, Hong Kong. find

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