Article

Name: The interaction between vowel quality and quantity in the Khanty language: An ultrasound visualization study

Authors: Timofey V. Timkin, Polina A. Lyapina, Polina I. Li

Institute of Philology of the Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Novosibirsk, Russian Federation

In the section Linguistics

Abstract:

This paper examines tongue movement during vowel production in the Kazym dialect of the Khanty language, captured via ultrasound intraoral imaging and synchronous audio recordings of two native speakers. Vowels were recorded in monosyllabic, bisyllabic, and polysyllabic wordforms and annotated with phonetic transcription. Articulatory movements were synchronized with sound boundaries derived from acoustic data. Tongue shapes were extracted for statistical analysis as control point coordinates. Using the R programming language, summarized tongue profiles were generated, and peak tongue height metrics were calculated to compare articulation and track movement over time. Absolute and relative duration metrics were also employed to describe vowel quantity. The obtained somatic data corroborate previous acoustic findings. The results reveal that short vowels include high /i/, /ʉ/, /u/ and low /a/, while long vowels consist of mid /e:/, /ө:/, /o:/ and low /a:/. Non-first syllables are identified as primary positions for both quality and quantity reduction. This reduction process is analyzed dynamically. Findings show that full vowels (/i/, /e:/, /a:/) in non-first syllables maintain coarticulatory strategies typical of the first syllable, triggering consonant accommodation or exhibiting shifting tongue movement directions. Thus, full vowels retain a timbre close to their first-syllable realizations, albeit slightly centralized due to shortened duration. Conversely, reduced vowels employ a different coarticulatory strategy, manifesting as a transitional movement from one consonant to the next, resulting in high timbral variability. This phenomenon is interpreted through B. Lindblom’s H&H-theory as an example of hypoarticulation, a simplification of sound transitions where targets are only partially reached.

Keywords: experimental phonetics, Khanty language, Kazym dialect, Ultrasound inoral imaging

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