An ultrasonic investigation of retracted consonants in St’at’imcets (Lillooet Salish)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Tongue retraction is rare in native languages of North America. Previous literature on St’at’imcets (also known as Lillooet) has left unanswered the question of how retracted consonants (uvulars, a pharyngeal, and a subset of retracted coronals) are articulated, and whether they in fact involve tongue retraction. Based on perceptual and acoustic data, previous descriptions differ with respect to the involvement of the tongue dorsum and tongue root in the articulation of St’at’imcets retracted consonants, particularly with the orthographic ‘‘g,’’ disputed to be either a uvular or pharyngeal approximant [Shahin, 1997; van Eijk, 1997]. Articulatory data of retracted and nonretracted consonants were collected from 4 St’at’imcets speakers via a portable ultrasound machine. Results indicate a significant difference in tongue root, dorsum, and body position for retracted versus nonretracted consonants, with the former possessing more tongue root and dorsum backing and tongue body lowering than the latter. Furthermore, results show ‘‘g’’ to be articulated similarly to the uvular consonant, with the tongue dorsum moving towards the posterior uvula/upper pharyngeal region of the vocal tract. These results provide direct evidence for the articulatory makeup of St’at’imcets retracted consonants and shed light on St’at’imcets retraction effects and phonological harmony processes. [Work supported by SSHRC.]
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".