Zhongjiang Chinese (中江话) is a variety of Mandarin Chinese, one of the ten language families in China (Mandarin, Cantonese, Xiang, Min, Gan, etc.,). Sometimes the term “Mandarin” is also used to refer to the national lingua franca “Putonghua”. We refer to the national lingua franca as “Standard Mandarin” and reserve the term Mandarin (官话) to refer to the language family, as distinct from other families, e.g., Cantonese, Xiang, Min, Gan, etc. Within Mandarin, Zhongjiang is a member of the Southwestern dialects (西南官话) (Language Atlas of China 1988). It is spoken in the urban areas of Zhongjiang county (中江县) in Sichuan province (四川省 ) of China. Zhongjiang county belongs to the Deyang (德阳) region, which is located in the middle of Sichuan province, about 100 kilometers northeast from the provincial capital of Chengdu (成都). Zhongjiang is just beyond the Chengdu Plain (成都平原), so the terrain is mostly hilly, with little flat land. It has a population of 1.37 million residents and an area of 2,200km2 (data from Zhongjiang official website, updated July 7, 2021).

This Illustration focuses on Kua’nsi (kʰwa33n̩21si33, ISO639: ykn), a Central Ngwi (or Yi) language of the Sino-Tibetan family (Bradley 1997; Fan et al., 2017). It is spoken by approximately 5000 people in Liuhe Township (六合乡, Liùhé Xiāng), Heqing County (鹤庆县, Hèqìng Xiàn), Dali Bai Autonomous Prefecture, Yunnan Province, China (see the map in Figure 1). Kua’nsi people refer to themselves as Kua’eshi (夸萼氏 Kuà’èshì) in Chinese and other ethnic groups, Bai (白 Bái) and Han (汉 Hàn) people living in the county, call them as Baiyi people (白依人 Báiyīrén) in Chinese because of their white traditional clothes.

This study investigated lateral asymmetry in the linguopalatal speech sounds of British English by means of electropalatography. This instrumental technique visualizes tongue–palate contact during speech production and allows for the quantification of contact patterns. The first and main objective of the study was to establish a method of measuring asymmetry that would be more sensitive than the approach used previously and would facilitate statistical analysis. The method employed a modified index of asymmetry and controlled for the overall amount of tongue–palate contact. The secondary objective was to use the proposed method to quantify asymmetry in the production of the linguopalatal consonants of British English, focusing on asymmetry observed in the region of the palate corresponding to the place of articulation. Regression analysis of 22,004 speech sounds, produced by four native speakers, indicated that the approximant /l/ is the most asymmetrical speech sound, followed by the central approximants /j, r/. Although fricatives had been hypothesized to be highly asymmetrical, they were not consistently more asymmetrical than plosives. In terms of the place of articulation of speech sounds, velar sounds were less asymmetrical than alveolars. It was possible to account for some of these findings by referring to the unilateral productions of approximants.