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.

KEYWORDS:

• Acoustic analysis
• fricatives
• tongue bifurcation
• variation

Acknowledgments

We wish to thank the 12 individuals in the bifurcated tongue group for their curiosity and participation in this study. We gratefully acknowledge the many contributions to this research from two anonymous reviewers, Jennifer Abel, Nicole Anger, Kathleen Currie Hall, Avery Ozburn, Wini Murphey, Joseph Stemberger, Tanya Tam, Jonathan de Vries, Grace Wei and Noriko Yamane. Some of our praat scripts were adapted from Mieta Lennes. Thanks to Russ Foxx, professional body modification artist, for consultation and help recruiting participants.

Declaration of interest

The authors report no conflicts of interest.

Funding

The authors wish to acknowledge the support of an NSERC USRA grant to the first author.

Additional information

Funding

The authors wish to acknowledge the support of an NSERC USRA grant to the first author.