摘要：Previous phonetic studies show a co-articulatory effect of retracted consonants on
adjacent high vowels resulting in tongue-root retraction and tongue-body lowering. The
present study uses ultrasound imaging to investigate whether an inherently low vowel
would also show evidence for retraction or show opacity as observed cross-
linguistically with other tongue root and tongue body phenomena. Focusing on the two
retracted conditions claimed in previous studies (VC and CV sequences with retracted
consonants), results of the present study show that compared to the position of the
tongue-root in non-retracted contexts, the low vowel has a significantly more retracted
tongue-root when it precedes retracted consonants. No significant difference in tongue-
root position is observed between /a/ in a CV sequence with retracted consonants and /a/
in a non-retracted context. Thus even though the low vowel is not opaque to retraction
in St’át’imcets, it retracts only when preceding consonants, not following retracted
consonants.
