Surgut Khanty vowel system based on electromagnetic articulography data

Abstract

The paper deals with the quality features of Surgut Khanty vowels obtained by an electromagnetic articulography experiment with one native speaker of the dialect. During the experiment, coordinates of the sensors placed on the speaker’s tongue and lips were tracked with an electromagnetic field. In total, approximately 350 isolated phonetic words were recorded. The coordinates of the tongue sensor placed on the dorsum and the interlabial distance calculated from the data of two sensors on the lower and upper lips were used for the analysis. The articulography data confirm some observations made earlier with audition and acoustic techniques: there are mid-row vowels (/ɨː/ and some allophones of /ʉ/, /ɘ/, /ʊː/), mid-closed vowels (/ɘ/, /o/, /oː/), and mid-open vowels (/ɛ/, /ɔ/, /ɔː/) in the dialect. It has been shown that when using the proposed sensor displacement, the horizontal coordinate is informative for the vowel row, the vertical coordinate correlates with the vowel openness, and the interlabial distance corresponds to the openness and the rounding. At the same time, the displacement used was found to be not always indicative for distinguishing the low and low-open vowels and pharyngeal features.