A preliminary ultrasound study of Nepali lingual articulations
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Previous descriptive and phonetic works on Nepali provided conflicting accounts of place contrasts in coronal consonants. Specifically, apical stops were characterized as either retroflex or alveolar, while laminal affricates were described as either alveolar or palatal. Some of these works used static palatography, which shows the contact between the tongue and the palate, but provides no information about the tongue shape for a given consonant or its dynamic properties. In this study we used ultrasound to image tongue shapes for various Nepali lingual consonants produced by a single native speaker of Brahmin dialect. The results showed that the speaker's apical stops were produced with a substantially raised tongue front and retracted tongue tip, as would be expected of retroflex articulations. Laminal affricates had the tongue shape similar to dental stops, yet with a somewhat retracted tongue tip, indicative of the alveolar constriction. Apicals that differed in laryngeal features (voiceless, voiced, aspirated, breathy) did not show systematic differences in the tongue shape, except for the voiced stop, which was somewhat less retracted. While limited to the single speaker, the results confirm and extend some previous observations about Nepali coronals as showing a 3-way place contrast among dentals, alveolars, and retroflexes.
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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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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".