Tongue musculature and the feature of tension in English vowels.
Electromyographic techniques were employed to discover which, if any, intrinsic and extrinsic tongue muscles displayed a difference in overall amount of activity corresponding to the traditional tense-lax distinction between members of the English vowel pairs /i-I/, /e-epsilon/, and /u-u/. Although some muscles revealed a consistent difference, most did not. Even for those muscles where a tense-lax difference was found, the data do not support the notion that tension was a necessary of sufficient differentia of production.
D000200:Action Potentials; D006801:Humans; D009119:Muscle Contraction; D009132:Muscles / Q000502:physiology*; D010700:Phonetics; D014059:Tongue / Q000502:physiology*; D014481:United States