A Cross-linguistic Articulatory Analysis of Palatalization in Korean, English, and Scottish Gaelic

Palatalization refers to a type of coarticulation in which the place of articulation of some sound is closer to the palate than otherwise expected, very often triggered by adjacent palatal segments. It has been known as one of the most dynamic phonological phenomena in phonetic and phonological research, but the articulatory nature of palatalization still merits further investigation. This dissertation investigates the articulatory patterns of palatalization in Korean, English, and Scottish Gaelic (Gàidhlig), all of which are typologically distinct from one another and exhibit both language-universal and language-specific palatalization processes. The main question asked in this dissertation is which articulatory properties of palatalization are universal across languages, and specific to languages or to individuals. Three production experiments using ultrasound imaging technology were conducted to capture tongue gestures of speakers from three different language groups. The results from 30 speakers in the three language groups show that both phonemic and phonetic plain vs. palatalized differences manifest gesturally. Furthermore, the results show that there is a significant amount of articulatory variability across languages and speakers, yielding no clear universal "palatal" gesture, but some articulatory strategies seem to be shared by speakers from different languages. The theoretical and empirical implications of the findings are discussed