2018 Volume 22 Issue 2 Pages 81-94
A growing body of cross-linguistic research has shown that speakers advance the tongue root during the production of voiced stops to meet aerodynamic requirements for voicing. The current study investigates the tongue root positioning during the production of voiced and voiceless stops in Russian, which has contrastive palatalization. Ultrasound tongue imaging data collected from five native Russian speakers revealed that the tongue root position is affected more by palatalization than by voicing, suggesting that (i) articulatory strategies of accommodating for the aerodynamic constraint are language-specific; (ii) the (dis) preference for particular strategies may be constrained by the language-specific use of articulatory space, such as the presence of palatalization.
