The weaknesses of the tongue arching model of vowel articulation
In 1867 Alexander Melville Bell conceived the high-low front-back tongue position model for vowels, including the concept of central vowels. This model was rapidly accepted by the phonetics community, but it has never been validated. This article reports an examination of 38 sets of X-ray tracings of vowels from 15 different languages, published in the past half century. This corroborates the char
