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.
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 distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| 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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 teacher head, 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".