Speaker: LCEAL: Donna Erickson (Showa University of Music, Japan; Haskins Laboratories, US) Title: Mandible movement patterns of Japanese and English: How to reset them

Abstract:

We all know that the phonetic cues of phonological categories are applied differently by speakers of different languages, and that these differences present challenges to teachers and learners of a second language. The purpose of this talk is to show that mandible movement patterns also are language-specific. First, I show how the mandible is the articulatory organizer of the syllable; for each syllable, the mandible opens and closes. Next, I show how the mandible lowers more for emphasis and prominence; then I show mandible lowering patterns for utterances in English and in Japanese. For English, the mandible lowering patterns coincide with the nuclear stress patterns (i.e., metrical organization of the utterance), while for Japanese the mandible lowering patterns show edge-strengthening effects, along the lines outlined by Jun (2014). I then show how language learners tend to carry over their first language mandible movement patterns when learning a new language, and I suggest how mandible training, i..e, “jaw dancing” (Wilson et al. 2020), might help language learners reset their mandible patterns to produce prominence patterns of the new language.

• Jun, S.-A. (2014).  Prosodic typology: By prominence type, word prosody, and macro-rhythm, In S.-A. Jun (ed.) Prosodic typologyII: The phonology of intonation and phrasing, pp. 520– 539, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014.
• Wilson, I., Erickson, D., T. Vance, T., and Moore, J. (2020). Jaw dancing American style: A way to teach English rhythm, Speech Prosody

 

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