The place of articulation for vowels refers to the arching action of the tongue to produce front, mid or back vowels.

• We will switch now to some (four) of the more interesting distinctive features of vowels. The four I have chosen to discuss are: The place of articulation; the height of articulation; tense versus lax vowels; and lip rounding.

  The Place of Articulation: This sounds suspiciously like a feature that we discussed earlier for consonants. But vowels don‰t involve the constriction of vocal air flow. In this case, place of articulation is referring to the contour of the tongue.

  • The tongue is capable of arching in different ways to partition the air masses in the oral cavity.
    
    
  • The vowels that are produced when the tongue arches toward the front are called front vowels. An example would be the vowel in the word:
    • "beat."
      
      
  • When the tongue arches toward the center, we have mid vowels produced, such as in the word:
    • "up."

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