Investigating dialectal differences using articulography

The present study introduces electromagnetic articulography, the measurement of the position of tongue and lips during speech, as a promising method for the study of dialect variation. By using generalized additive modeling to analyze the articulatory trajectories, we are able to reliably detect aggregate group differences, while simultaneously taking into account the individual variation of dozens of speakers. Our results show that two Dutch dialects show clear differences in their articulatory settings, with a more anterior tongue position in the dialect from Ubbergen in the southern half of the Netherlands than in the dialect of Ter Apel in the northern half of the Netherlands. This clearly demonstrates that articulography is able to reveal interesting structural differences between dialects which are not visible when only focusing on the acoustic signal.