Representations of Place and Airstream Mechanism: A real-time MRI study of Tigrinya ejectives

Manner of articulation, including airstream mechanism, is not known to systematically affect place of articulation (cf. Hoole et. al., 1998). If such a systematic relation were identified, it could provide new ways of understanding how aerodynamics is integrated into the phonetic and phonological representation of speech sounds. However, there is currently little articulatory evidence of how the supralaryngeal vocal tract is configured in order to achieve particular airstreams, including glottalic egressives (ejectives). In this study, we use real-time magnetic resonance imaging (rtMRI; Fu et. al., 2015; Carignan et. al., 2015) to examine how the articulatory configurations associated with velar stops in Tigrinya are affected by pulmonic versus egressive airstreams.