Abstract

The objective of this research was to analyse the articulatory movements linked with the mid-sagittal plane in Australian English /l/. For this purpose, the investigation employed the experimental paradigm introduced by Sproat and Fujimura (1993) as a methodological framework for analysis. The study involved monitoring the production of syllable-initial and -final /l/s in four distinct vowel environments (/æ/, /ɛ/, /ɪ/ and /u/) by six speakers, using three-dimensional electromagnetic articulography (3D EMA). The timing lag difference between the tongue tip (TT) and the tongue middle (TM) was measured, along with the lag between the tongue tip (TT) and the tongue back (TB). Results revealed that during the articulation of the alveolar lateral approximant /l/ in initial and final positions within syllables, the timing and coordination of tongue movements differ. The findings align with previous research on the articulation of lateral approximant /l/ in American-accented English. The temporal coordination between coronal (i.e., TT) and dorsal (i.e., TM/TB) articulatory movements would be influenced by syllable position. In syllable-initial /l/s, coronal and dorsal articulatory movements are nearly simultaneous, whereas in syllable-final /l/s, dorsal articulatory movement precedes the coronal articulatory movement. Regarding the vowel effect, we observed that the influence of vowels on timing differences is not consistent across all measurements. While adjacent vowels partly affected timing discrepancies, particularly in the tongue tip-to-middle (TT-TM) measurement in syllable-final positions, the tongue tip-to-back (TT-TB) measurement does not show the impact of surrounding vowels, except in the /æ/ vowel environment.