Laagsegment

Laagsegment is a term used in phonetics and linguistic analysis to describe a speech segment characterized by a relatively low tongue height in the oral cavity. The concept is tied to the broader idea that articulatory height influences the acoustic qualities of speech, particularly vowels. In some Dutch-language sources the term is used to denote segments associated with open or low articulation, as opposed to hoogsegment, which refers to high or close articulation. Because terminology in phonetics is not fully standardized, the exact definition of laagsegment can vary between researchers and theoretical frameworks.

In practice, laagsegment is often discussed in relation to vowel height, where low vowels are described as laagsegment relative to mid or high vowels. The notion can be extended to describe segmental features within an articulatory or acoustic model that treats height as a defining parameter. The distinction between laagsegment and hoogsegment can support descriptive analyses of vowel inventories, vowel height contrasts, and the way height interacts with other features such as backness or rounding.

Applications of the concept appear in fields such as speech synthesis, speech recognition, and articulatory phonetics, where height-based segment features may be incorporated into feature vectors or models of pronunciation. The term is more common in Dutch-language literature and in certain theoretical or computational approaches; it is less widely used in international phonetics literature, where the standard terms for vowel height (high, mid, low) are more prevalent.

See also: hoogsegment, vowel height, articulatory phonetics, phonetic feature analysis.