Tongue Position in Rounded and Unrounded Front Vowel Pairs

Traditional articulatory descriptions of front rounded and unrounded vowel pairs have assumed that tongue height is the same for the members of the pairs /i-y/, /e-ø/, and /ε-œ/. The electromyographic, articulatory synthetic, and acoustic investigations carried out in this study indicate that, in Dutch, the rounded member of the pairs /i-y/ and /e-ø/ was centralized. In the /ε-œ/ pair, however, the rounded vowel bears a different relationship to its unrounded counterpart.