Noriko Yamane - Academia.edu (original) (raw)
Papers by Noriko Yamane
Tsukuba English studies, Aug 31, 1993
This dissertation investigates the place of articulation of allegedly 'placeless' consonants of J... more This dissertation investigates the place of articulation of allegedly 'placeless' consonants of Japanese-the moraic nasal /N/ and the glottal fricative /h/. In the discipline of phonology, these two consonants have typically been analyzed as having no place features of their own, on the grounds that their place features are predictable from the adjacent segments, that they often appear as outputs of debuccalization, and that they show high articulatory variability. While some researchers believe that certain segments are placeless both phonologically and phonetically, it has not been examined how these Japanese consonants appear in the surface phonetics. The current research instrumentally tests the hypothesis that they have articulatory targets, based on qualitative and quantitative examination of data produced by native speakers of Japanese. Such a study is important in order to fill the scientific gap between the phonological theories and phonetic approaches to the study of sounds. Ultrasound experiments were conducted on six native speakers of Tokyo Japanese, and the tongue movement was analyzed. The tracing of the overall tongue configurations on the ultrasound imaging was done by EdgeTrak (Stone 2005). The data for placeless segments were compared to those for the adjacent vowels, in terms of tongue shape, constriction degree and constriction location. The results involve three significant points: First, /N/ shows a significant dorsum raising for all speakers, while /h/ shows a pharyngeal constriction for 5 out of 6 speakers. Second, the constriction location is different across speakers: The location of /N/ ranges from post-alveolar to uvular, and the location of /h/ is either uvular or pharyngeal. Third, /N/ and /h/ had no more variability than /k/, which is widely assumed to be a velar-specified segment. This research empirically confirms that these two segments are articulatorily stable within a speaker but variable across speakers. This contradicts long-standing views about the segments in question. The individual variability may also lend support for the phonologization of different phonetic interpretations. Finally, the place-features of these same segments could be different across languages, and further instrumental studies of these sounds are encouraged.
Impact, Dec 16, 2020
Dr Noriko Yamane is an expert in speech production and perception based at Hiroshima University i... more Dr Noriko Yamane is an expert in speech production and perception based at Hiroshima University in Japan. Yamane is leading a team which is carrying out research to elucidate the precise mechanisms of the tongue and speechgestures that are required to learn English as a second language. Yamane's goal is to help people who do not respond well to traditional approaches to improving articulation. Her long-term goal is to work with engineers and develop an app available for speakers, communities of the deaf and/or atypical speech, to help them to improve their communication.
358 Noriko Yamane kirk 1982: 347-349, among others), whether they are in the onset or the coda po... more 358 Noriko Yamane kirk 1982: 347-349, among others), whether they are in the onset or the coda position. This treatment seems to be reasonable for PE. What I would like to argue in this section is that this is not always correct, from a diachronic viewpoint. Specifically, the ...
This study examined English emotional prosody and identified differences in vocal expression of l... more This study examined English emotional prosody and identified differences in vocal expression of love and sorrow among first language (L1) speakers, learners of English as a foreign language (EFL), and text-to-speech systems (TTS). American professional narrators (AE) and Japanese college students (JP) were instructed to read aloud and record a love letter and a condolence letter. The same letters were also read by synthetic speakers on a web-based TTS. The measurements targeted "booster expressions"-lexical grammatical items of various types which increase the effectiveness of emotional utterances (Quirk & Greenbaum, 1973). The results showed that onset consonant duration, pitch range, intensity, and speech rate had significant differences among groups. These findings suggest that all these features contribute significantly to how AE express love and sorrow, which is still not available through the current default system of TTS. The findings have an impact on the broader topic of speaking English as a foreign language inside and outside classroom environments.
One usage of medical ultrasound imaging is to visualize and characterize human tongue shape and m... more One usage of medical ultrasound imaging is to visualize and characterize human tongue shape and motion during a real-time speech to study healthy or impaired speech production. Due to the low-contrast characteristic and noisy nature of ultrasound images, it might require expertise for non-expert users to recognize tongue gestures in applications such as visual training of a second language. Moreover, quantitative analysis of tongue motion needs the tongue dorsum contour to be extracted, tracked, and visualized. Manual tongue contour extraction is a cumbersome, subjective, and error-prone task. Furthermore, it is not a feasible solution for real-time applications. The growth of deep learning has been vigorously exploited in various computer vision tasks, including ultrasound tongue contour tracking. In the current methods, the process of tongue contour extraction comprises two steps of image segmentation and post-processing. This paper presents a new novel approach of automatic and real-time tongue contour tracking using deep neural networks. In the proposed method, instead of the two-step procedure, landmarks of the tongue surface are tracked. This novel idea enables researchers in this filed to benefits from available previously annotated databases to achieve high accuracy results. Our experiment disclosed the outstanding performances of the proposed technique in terms of generalization, performance, and accuracy.
This study examined the perception of English information focus by Japanese EFL learners who enco... more This study examined the perception of English information focus by Japanese EFL learners who encounter difficulties in producing sentence-level prosody (Fujimori, Yoshimura and Shirahata 2014). In a perception task, high-intermediate Japanese EFL learners could correctly perceive only early narrow focus, which is attributed to the Japanese-specific prosodic property of downstep contours. *
This dissertation investigates the place of articulation of allegedly 'placeless' consonants of J... more This dissertation investigates the place of articulation of allegedly 'placeless' consonants of Japanese-the moraic nasal /N/ and the glottal fricative /h/. In the discipline of phonology, these two consonants have typically been analyzed as having no place features of their own, on the grounds that their place features are predictable from the adjacent segments, that they often appear as outputs of debuccalization, and that they show high articulatory variability. While some researchers believe that certain segments are placeless both phonologically and phonetically, it has not been examined how these Japanese consonants appear in the surface phonetics. The current research instrumentally tests the hypothesis that they have articulatory targets, based on qualitative and quantitative examination of data produced by native speakers of Japanese. Such a study is important in order to fill the scientific gap between the phonological theories and phonetic approaches to the study of sounds. Ultrasound experiments were conducted on six native speakers of Tokyo Japanese, and the tongue movement was analyzed. The tracing of the overall tongue configurations on the ultrasound imaging was done by EdgeTrak (Stone 2005). The data for placeless segments were compared to those for the adjacent vowels, in terms of tongue shape, constriction degree and constriction location. The results involve three significant points: First, /N/ shows a significant dorsum raising for all speakers, while /h/ shows a pharyngeal constriction for 5 out of 6 speakers. Second, the constriction location is different across speakers: The location of /N/ ranges from post-alveolar to uvular, and the location of /h/ is either uvular or pharyngeal. Third, /N/ and /h/ had no more variability than /k/, which is widely assumed to be a velar-specified segment. This research empirically confirms that these two segments are articulatorily stable within a speaker but variable across speakers. This contradicts long-standing views about the segments in question. The individual variability may also lend support for the phonologization of different phonetic interpretations. Finally, the place-features of these same segments could be different across languages, and further instrumental studies of these sounds are encouraged.
Phonological transfer of L2 occurs both at segmental and suprasegmental levels. It has been repor... more Phonological transfer of L2 occurs both at segmental and suprasegmental levels. It has been reported that advanced learners who have mastered segments of L2 can still show accentedness at suprasegmental levels. Studies have found that language-particular prosody is influenced by word order (Nespor et al. 2008), phrasing (Selkirk & Tateishi 1991), syllable structures and isochrony (Kubozono,1989). In light of prosodic transfer of Japanese speakers of L2 English, Ueyama (2000) found that the prosodic transfer is observed at the level of lexical accent, duration, and temporal organization across syllables. However, it not clear why the asymmetry between segments and prosody exists in the acquisition of phonology, and how the native-like prosody can be learned. The current study investigates prosodic transfer hypothesis (Goad et al. 2003), and examines what Japanese speakers’ L2 English data can tell us about prosody transfer, especially on pitch and intensity. 4 Japanese university EF...
音韻研究, 2007
This paper tries to capture variations of vowel harmony in Conflation Theory (de Lacy (2002, 2004... more This paper tries to capture variations of vowel harmony in Conflation Theory (de Lacy (2002, 2004, 2006)). Yamane-Tanaka (2006) assumes Gitksan harmony has variations across speakers: translaryngeal and transguttural. These two types cannot be captured in Conflation Theory unless the composite set of Place features in a markedness category is properly revised. The proposal here is to divide the markedness constraint prohibiting dorsal (= *K) into two distinct constraints (= *K and *Q). This solution captures laryngeal transparency and guttural transparency only with the reranking of conflated constraints, without stipulating a language-specific markedness reversal. This approach limits variations among sets of the so-called transparent consonants.
This study investigates the production of three sibilant fricatives in Taiwan Mandarin, dental [s... more This study investigates the production of three sibilant fricatives in Taiwan Mandarin, dental [s], retroflex [ʂ], and alveolopalatal [ɕ], using ultrasound recording. Previous studies have pointed out that some speakers of Taiwan Mandarin lose the contrast between dental and retroflex sibilants in connected speech. In the literature on speech production, it has been well recognized that factors like speaking rate and speaking style significantly affect articulatory movements in such a way that fast speech or casual speech tends to result in the undershooting of articulatory targets and the loss of phonetic contrasts. In this study, we investigated whether the loss of the contrast between dental and retroflex sibilants in Taiwan Mandarin would be conditioned by speaking style. We examined whether the contrast between dental [s] and retroflex [ʂ] in Taiwan Mandarin was maintained in the production of citation forms in read speech.
Voicing in Japanese, 2005
The implicational distribution of prenasalized stops in Japanese Noriko Yamane-Tanaka Introductio... more The implicational distribution of prenasalized stops in Japanese Noriko Yamane-Tanaka Introduction This paper gives an account of the regular affinity among voice, nasal and place of articulation, focusing on intervocalic stop consonants in Japanese. There is agreement ...
The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 2004
The question of whether schwa is targeted or targetless has been the subject of much debate (Brow... more The question of whether schwa is targeted or targetless has been the subject of much debate (Browman et al., 1992; Browman and Goldstein, 1995; Gick, 1999, 2002). Gick (2002) found that there is a pharyngeal constriction during schwa relative to rest position, and concluded that schwa is not targetless. This experiment further showed a ‘‘bimodal’’ pattern in schwa in a nonrhotic speaker, indicating that the subject has distinct schwas in lexical words and function words. The present study examines the existence of the ‘‘bimodal’’ pattern in schwas in nonrhotic dialects through an acoustic experiment. It is predicted that there is a significant difference in formant values between lexical schwas and function schwas. Results to date indicate a significant difference in them between schwas in lexical versus function words, both between historical schwas and those derived from final /r/ reduction. Data from several additional nonrhotic subjects will be presented. Implications for intrus...
The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 2005
What types of consonants are transparent in vowel harmony in Gitksan has been little understood. ... more What types of consonants are transparent in vowel harmony in Gitksan has been little understood. Previous studies suggest that it is translaryngeal harmony, where the qualities of unstressed suffixal vowels are harmonized with the ones of last stem vowels, apparently skipping the stem-final laryngeal stop and laryngeal fricative [Rigsby, unpublished manuscript, University of Queensland, Australia, 1986; Rigsby and Ingram, International Journal of American Linguistics 56, 251–263 (1990)]. However, our original data show that harmony takes place when the stem-final consonant is uvular as well. It suggests that it cannot simply be analyzed as laryngeal transparency, but it could be reanalyzed as [+low] transparency. The present study examines cross-consonantal vowel harmony through acoustic experiment. It is predicted that there is a significant difference in formant values between the vowels across uvular or laryngeal consonants versus the ones across the other consonants. New data fr...
Language and Speech, Dec 30, 2019
In Taiwan Mandarin, retroflex [ʂ] is allegedly merging with dental [s], reducing the traditional ... more In Taiwan Mandarin, retroflex [ʂ] is allegedly merging with dental [s], reducing the traditional three-way contrast between sibilant fricatives (i.e., dental [s] - retroflex [ʂ]-alveopalatal [ɕ]) to a two-way contrast. Most of the literature on the observed merging focuses on the acoustic properties and perceptual identification of the sibilants whereas much less attention has been drawn to the articulatory evidence accounting for the aforementioned sibilant merging. The current study employed ultrasound imaging techniques to uncover the tongue postures for the three sibilant fricatives [s, ʂ, ɕ] in Taiwan Mandarin occurring before vowels [a], [ɨ], and [o]. Results revealed varying classes of the [s-ʂ] merger: complete merging (overlap), no merging (non-overlap), and context-dependent merging (context-dependent overlap which only occurred before [a]). The observed [s-ʂ] merger was also confirmed by the perceptual identification by trained phoneticians. Center of gravity (CoG), a reliable spectral moment of identifying different sibilant fricatives, was also measured to reflect the articulatory-acoustic correspondence. Results showed that the [s-ʂ] merger varies across speakers and may also be conditioned by vowel contexts and that articulatory mergers may not be entirely reflected in CoG values, suggesting that auxiliary articulatory gestures may be employed to maintain the acoustic contrast.
Tsukuba English studies, Aug 31, 1993
This dissertation investigates the place of articulation of allegedly 'placeless' consonants of J... more This dissertation investigates the place of articulation of allegedly 'placeless' consonants of Japanese-the moraic nasal /N/ and the glottal fricative /h/. In the discipline of phonology, these two consonants have typically been analyzed as having no place features of their own, on the grounds that their place features are predictable from the adjacent segments, that they often appear as outputs of debuccalization, and that they show high articulatory variability. While some researchers believe that certain segments are placeless both phonologically and phonetically, it has not been examined how these Japanese consonants appear in the surface phonetics. The current research instrumentally tests the hypothesis that they have articulatory targets, based on qualitative and quantitative examination of data produced by native speakers of Japanese. Such a study is important in order to fill the scientific gap between the phonological theories and phonetic approaches to the study of sounds. Ultrasound experiments were conducted on six native speakers of Tokyo Japanese, and the tongue movement was analyzed. The tracing of the overall tongue configurations on the ultrasound imaging was done by EdgeTrak (Stone 2005). The data for placeless segments were compared to those for the adjacent vowels, in terms of tongue shape, constriction degree and constriction location. The results involve three significant points: First, /N/ shows a significant dorsum raising for all speakers, while /h/ shows a pharyngeal constriction for 5 out of 6 speakers. Second, the constriction location is different across speakers: The location of /N/ ranges from post-alveolar to uvular, and the location of /h/ is either uvular or pharyngeal. Third, /N/ and /h/ had no more variability than /k/, which is widely assumed to be a velar-specified segment. This research empirically confirms that these two segments are articulatorily stable within a speaker but variable across speakers. This contradicts long-standing views about the segments in question. The individual variability may also lend support for the phonologization of different phonetic interpretations. Finally, the place-features of these same segments could be different across languages, and further instrumental studies of these sounds are encouraged.
Impact, Dec 16, 2020
Dr Noriko Yamane is an expert in speech production and perception based at Hiroshima University i... more Dr Noriko Yamane is an expert in speech production and perception based at Hiroshima University in Japan. Yamane is leading a team which is carrying out research to elucidate the precise mechanisms of the tongue and speechgestures that are required to learn English as a second language. Yamane's goal is to help people who do not respond well to traditional approaches to improving articulation. Her long-term goal is to work with engineers and develop an app available for speakers, communities of the deaf and/or atypical speech, to help them to improve their communication.
358 Noriko Yamane kirk 1982: 347-349, among others), whether they are in the onset or the coda po... more 358 Noriko Yamane kirk 1982: 347-349, among others), whether they are in the onset or the coda position. This treatment seems to be reasonable for PE. What I would like to argue in this section is that this is not always correct, from a diachronic viewpoint. Specifically, the ...
This study examined English emotional prosody and identified differences in vocal expression of l... more This study examined English emotional prosody and identified differences in vocal expression of love and sorrow among first language (L1) speakers, learners of English as a foreign language (EFL), and text-to-speech systems (TTS). American professional narrators (AE) and Japanese college students (JP) were instructed to read aloud and record a love letter and a condolence letter. The same letters were also read by synthetic speakers on a web-based TTS. The measurements targeted "booster expressions"-lexical grammatical items of various types which increase the effectiveness of emotional utterances (Quirk & Greenbaum, 1973). The results showed that onset consonant duration, pitch range, intensity, and speech rate had significant differences among groups. These findings suggest that all these features contribute significantly to how AE express love and sorrow, which is still not available through the current default system of TTS. The findings have an impact on the broader topic of speaking English as a foreign language inside and outside classroom environments.
One usage of medical ultrasound imaging is to visualize and characterize human tongue shape and m... more One usage of medical ultrasound imaging is to visualize and characterize human tongue shape and motion during a real-time speech to study healthy or impaired speech production. Due to the low-contrast characteristic and noisy nature of ultrasound images, it might require expertise for non-expert users to recognize tongue gestures in applications such as visual training of a second language. Moreover, quantitative analysis of tongue motion needs the tongue dorsum contour to be extracted, tracked, and visualized. Manual tongue contour extraction is a cumbersome, subjective, and error-prone task. Furthermore, it is not a feasible solution for real-time applications. The growth of deep learning has been vigorously exploited in various computer vision tasks, including ultrasound tongue contour tracking. In the current methods, the process of tongue contour extraction comprises two steps of image segmentation and post-processing. This paper presents a new novel approach of automatic and real-time tongue contour tracking using deep neural networks. In the proposed method, instead of the two-step procedure, landmarks of the tongue surface are tracked. This novel idea enables researchers in this filed to benefits from available previously annotated databases to achieve high accuracy results. Our experiment disclosed the outstanding performances of the proposed technique in terms of generalization, performance, and accuracy.
This study examined the perception of English information focus by Japanese EFL learners who enco... more This study examined the perception of English information focus by Japanese EFL learners who encounter difficulties in producing sentence-level prosody (Fujimori, Yoshimura and Shirahata 2014). In a perception task, high-intermediate Japanese EFL learners could correctly perceive only early narrow focus, which is attributed to the Japanese-specific prosodic property of downstep contours. *
This dissertation investigates the place of articulation of allegedly 'placeless' consonants of J... more This dissertation investigates the place of articulation of allegedly 'placeless' consonants of Japanese-the moraic nasal /N/ and the glottal fricative /h/. In the discipline of phonology, these two consonants have typically been analyzed as having no place features of their own, on the grounds that their place features are predictable from the adjacent segments, that they often appear as outputs of debuccalization, and that they show high articulatory variability. While some researchers believe that certain segments are placeless both phonologically and phonetically, it has not been examined how these Japanese consonants appear in the surface phonetics. The current research instrumentally tests the hypothesis that they have articulatory targets, based on qualitative and quantitative examination of data produced by native speakers of Japanese. Such a study is important in order to fill the scientific gap between the phonological theories and phonetic approaches to the study of sounds. Ultrasound experiments were conducted on six native speakers of Tokyo Japanese, and the tongue movement was analyzed. The tracing of the overall tongue configurations on the ultrasound imaging was done by EdgeTrak (Stone 2005). The data for placeless segments were compared to those for the adjacent vowels, in terms of tongue shape, constriction degree and constriction location. The results involve three significant points: First, /N/ shows a significant dorsum raising for all speakers, while /h/ shows a pharyngeal constriction for 5 out of 6 speakers. Second, the constriction location is different across speakers: The location of /N/ ranges from post-alveolar to uvular, and the location of /h/ is either uvular or pharyngeal. Third, /N/ and /h/ had no more variability than /k/, which is widely assumed to be a velar-specified segment. This research empirically confirms that these two segments are articulatorily stable within a speaker but variable across speakers. This contradicts long-standing views about the segments in question. The individual variability may also lend support for the phonologization of different phonetic interpretations. Finally, the place-features of these same segments could be different across languages, and further instrumental studies of these sounds are encouraged.
Phonological transfer of L2 occurs both at segmental and suprasegmental levels. It has been repor... more Phonological transfer of L2 occurs both at segmental and suprasegmental levels. It has been reported that advanced learners who have mastered segments of L2 can still show accentedness at suprasegmental levels. Studies have found that language-particular prosody is influenced by word order (Nespor et al. 2008), phrasing (Selkirk & Tateishi 1991), syllable structures and isochrony (Kubozono,1989). In light of prosodic transfer of Japanese speakers of L2 English, Ueyama (2000) found that the prosodic transfer is observed at the level of lexical accent, duration, and temporal organization across syllables. However, it not clear why the asymmetry between segments and prosody exists in the acquisition of phonology, and how the native-like prosody can be learned. The current study investigates prosodic transfer hypothesis (Goad et al. 2003), and examines what Japanese speakers’ L2 English data can tell us about prosody transfer, especially on pitch and intensity. 4 Japanese university EF...
音韻研究, 2007
This paper tries to capture variations of vowel harmony in Conflation Theory (de Lacy (2002, 2004... more This paper tries to capture variations of vowel harmony in Conflation Theory (de Lacy (2002, 2004, 2006)). Yamane-Tanaka (2006) assumes Gitksan harmony has variations across speakers: translaryngeal and transguttural. These two types cannot be captured in Conflation Theory unless the composite set of Place features in a markedness category is properly revised. The proposal here is to divide the markedness constraint prohibiting dorsal (= *K) into two distinct constraints (= *K and *Q). This solution captures laryngeal transparency and guttural transparency only with the reranking of conflated constraints, without stipulating a language-specific markedness reversal. This approach limits variations among sets of the so-called transparent consonants.
This study investigates the production of three sibilant fricatives in Taiwan Mandarin, dental [s... more This study investigates the production of three sibilant fricatives in Taiwan Mandarin, dental [s], retroflex [ʂ], and alveolopalatal [ɕ], using ultrasound recording. Previous studies have pointed out that some speakers of Taiwan Mandarin lose the contrast between dental and retroflex sibilants in connected speech. In the literature on speech production, it has been well recognized that factors like speaking rate and speaking style significantly affect articulatory movements in such a way that fast speech or casual speech tends to result in the undershooting of articulatory targets and the loss of phonetic contrasts. In this study, we investigated whether the loss of the contrast between dental and retroflex sibilants in Taiwan Mandarin would be conditioned by speaking style. We examined whether the contrast between dental [s] and retroflex [ʂ] in Taiwan Mandarin was maintained in the production of citation forms in read speech.
Voicing in Japanese, 2005
The implicational distribution of prenasalized stops in Japanese Noriko Yamane-Tanaka Introductio... more The implicational distribution of prenasalized stops in Japanese Noriko Yamane-Tanaka Introduction This paper gives an account of the regular affinity among voice, nasal and place of articulation, focusing on intervocalic stop consonants in Japanese. There is agreement ...
The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 2004
The question of whether schwa is targeted or targetless has been the subject of much debate (Brow... more The question of whether schwa is targeted or targetless has been the subject of much debate (Browman et al., 1992; Browman and Goldstein, 1995; Gick, 1999, 2002). Gick (2002) found that there is a pharyngeal constriction during schwa relative to rest position, and concluded that schwa is not targetless. This experiment further showed a ‘‘bimodal’’ pattern in schwa in a nonrhotic speaker, indicating that the subject has distinct schwas in lexical words and function words. The present study examines the existence of the ‘‘bimodal’’ pattern in schwas in nonrhotic dialects through an acoustic experiment. It is predicted that there is a significant difference in formant values between lexical schwas and function schwas. Results to date indicate a significant difference in them between schwas in lexical versus function words, both between historical schwas and those derived from final /r/ reduction. Data from several additional nonrhotic subjects will be presented. Implications for intrus...
The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 2005
What types of consonants are transparent in vowel harmony in Gitksan has been little understood. ... more What types of consonants are transparent in vowel harmony in Gitksan has been little understood. Previous studies suggest that it is translaryngeal harmony, where the qualities of unstressed suffixal vowels are harmonized with the ones of last stem vowels, apparently skipping the stem-final laryngeal stop and laryngeal fricative [Rigsby, unpublished manuscript, University of Queensland, Australia, 1986; Rigsby and Ingram, International Journal of American Linguistics 56, 251–263 (1990)]. However, our original data show that harmony takes place when the stem-final consonant is uvular as well. It suggests that it cannot simply be analyzed as laryngeal transparency, but it could be reanalyzed as [+low] transparency. The present study examines cross-consonantal vowel harmony through acoustic experiment. It is predicted that there is a significant difference in formant values between the vowels across uvular or laryngeal consonants versus the ones across the other consonants. New data fr...
Language and Speech, Dec 30, 2019
In Taiwan Mandarin, retroflex [ʂ] is allegedly merging with dental [s], reducing the traditional ... more In Taiwan Mandarin, retroflex [ʂ] is allegedly merging with dental [s], reducing the traditional three-way contrast between sibilant fricatives (i.e., dental [s] - retroflex [ʂ]-alveopalatal [ɕ]) to a two-way contrast. Most of the literature on the observed merging focuses on the acoustic properties and perceptual identification of the sibilants whereas much less attention has been drawn to the articulatory evidence accounting for the aforementioned sibilant merging. The current study employed ultrasound imaging techniques to uncover the tongue postures for the three sibilant fricatives [s, ʂ, ɕ] in Taiwan Mandarin occurring before vowels [a], [ɨ], and [o]. Results revealed varying classes of the [s-ʂ] merger: complete merging (overlap), no merging (non-overlap), and context-dependent merging (context-dependent overlap which only occurred before [a]). The observed [s-ʂ] merger was also confirmed by the perceptual identification by trained phoneticians. Center of gravity (CoG), a reliable spectral moment of identifying different sibilant fricatives, was also measured to reflect the articulatory-acoustic correspondence. Results showed that the [s-ʂ] merger varies across speakers and may also be conditioned by vowel contexts and that articulatory mergers may not be entirely reflected in CoG values, suggesting that auxiliary articulatory gestures may be employed to maintain the acoustic contrast.