Materials for poster 5aSC12, "Flaps and lowered fourth formant", ASA Fall 2019 (San Diego, CA).
Faytak, M., Aziz, J., Barnett, P., Jo, J., Kuo, J., Teixeira, G., Wu, J., Zhou, Z., and Keating, P. 2019. Flap articulation and lowered fourth formant. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 146: 3085.
Speakers of North American English are known to use a variety of tap/flap articulations depending on phonetic context (Derrick and Gick 2011); it is also known that NAE taps/flaps are sometimes associated with a greatly lowered F4 frequency (Warner and Tucker 2017). It has been less clear whether only certain articulatory variants show this acoustic effect. Since retroflex stops are also associated with lowered F4 (Blumstein and Stevens 1975), we predict that flap retroflexion lowers F4. To test this prediction, synchronized ultrasound and audio recordings were made of words containing /t, d/ in a variety of contexts known to give rise to tap/flap variants. Based on visual inspection of ultrasound videos, these were coded as one of four articulatory variants (low tap, high tap, up flap, down flap; Derrick and Gick 2011); formant frequencies were extracted from the audio at several timepoints relative to the tap/flap. Preliminary results from one speaker support the hypothesis: high taps and down flaps (variants with initial retroflexion) show an F4 drop into the consonant, while high taps and up flaps (variants with final retroflexion) show an F4 rise out of the consonant.