title: Effects of cosmetic tongue bifurcation on English fricative production.
abstract: Tongue bifurcation (also called 'splitting' or 'forking') is an increasingly popular cosmetic procedure in the body modification community that involves splitting the anterior tongue down the centre line. The implications of this procedure for speech have not been systematically studied; a few case studies have been published and suggest that there may be effects, primarily on fricatives. This article presents the first attempt to examine the acoustic implications of tongue bifurcation on speech production using a larger population sample. It compares the speech of 12 individuals with bifurcated tongues with a normative control group of equal size. Both qualitative assessment and quantitative assessment are carried out looking specifically at fricative production and perception. The speech of subjects with bifurcated tongues, while intelligible, shows a higher proportion of perceptibly atypical fricatives and significantly greater variance than seen in the control group.
authors.affiliation: a Department of Linguistics , University of British Columbia , Vancouver , British Columbia , Canada.
authors.forename: Alyson
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Budd
authors.affiliation: a Department of Linguistics , University of British Columbia , Vancouver , British Columbia , Canada.
authors.forename: Murray
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Schellenberg
authors.affiliation: a Department of Linguistics , University of British Columbia , Vancouver , British Columbia , Canada.
authors.forename: Bryan
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Gick
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007802:Language; D008297:Male; D013060:Speech; D013061:Speech Acoustics; D013067:Speech Perception; D014059:Tongue
keywords: Acoustic analysis; fricatives; tongue bifurcation; variation