Articulatory data for a five-way liquid contrast: 3D ultrasound of Marathi

Lateral and rhotic consonants show great crosslinguistic variation, and are traditionally described as articulatorily complex (Ladefoged & Maddieson 1996; Proctor 2011; Wiese 2001, 2011). A good body of work has investigated the characteristics of liquids in languages like English (Dellatre & Freeman 1968; Guenther et al. 1998; Sproat & Fujimura 1993; Westbury, Hashi, & Lindstrom 1998; many others), which contains a two-way contrast. What of South Asian languages, however, which often contain a greater number of liquids? Tamil liquids have been imaged using palatography and electropalatography (McDonough & Johnson 1997) as well as MRI (Narayanan et al. 1999), and Malayalam liquids have been imaged using mid-sagittal ultrasound (Scobbie, Punnoose, & Khattab 2013). Little has been done with Marathi, though. Like Tamil and Malayalam, Marathi—an Indic language spoken in the Indian state of Maharashtra—contains a five-way liquid contrast. This work utilizes recent advances in 3D ultrasonography to provide detailed articulatory data for Marathi's five liquids (/l/, /lɦ/ /r/ /rɦ/ /ɭ/) (Dhongde & Wali 2009; Pandharipande 1997). Real-time images of tongue motion are combined with digitized impressions of the palate to provide new insights into the complex articulatory gestures involved in production of these sounds.