Bilinguals from Larynx to Lips: Exploring Bilingual Articulatory Strategies with Anatomic MRI Data

The goal of this article is to illustrate the use of MRI for exploring bi- and multi-lingual articulatory strategies. One male and one female speaker recorded sets of static midsagittal MRIs of the whole vocal tract, producing vowels as well as consonants in various vowel contexts in either the male’s two or the female’s three languages. Both speakers were native speakers of English (American and Australian English, respectively), and both were fluent L2 speakers of French. In addition, the female speaker was a heritage speaker of Croatian. Articulatory contours extracted from the MRIs were subsequently used at three progressively more compact and abstract levels of analysis. (1) Direct comparison of overlaid contours was used to assess whether phones analogous across L1 and L2 are similar or dissimilar, both overall and in specific vocal tract regions. (2) Consonant contour variability along the vocal tract due to vowel context was determined using dispersion ellipses and used to explore the variable resistance to coarticulation for non-analogous rhotics and analogous laterals in Australian, French, and Croatian. (3) Articulatory modeling was used to focus on specific articulatory gestures (tongue position and shape, lip protrusion, laryngeal height, etc.) and then to explore the articulatory strategies in the speakers’ interlanguages for production of the French front rounded vowel series. This revealed that the Australian and American speakers used different strategies to produce the non-analogous French vowel series. We conclude that MRI-based articulatory data constitute a very rich and underused source of information that amply deserves applications to the study of L2 articulation and bilingual and multi-lingual speech.