Other people have written on or near this topic. For example, John Laver, in Principles of Phonetics (1994) postulates a neutral articulatory setting (pp 402-3) and goes on to set up a very detailed framework for describing all non-neutral articulatory settings, and on p. 424 acknowledges the relevance of Honikman’s work. Celce-Murcia et al (1996) Teaching Pronunciation have a section (pp 27-8) on Voice Quality which is clearly related, especially in respect of the supralaryngeal settings. In Cruttenden’s Gimson’s Pronunciation of English (2014) there is a short mention: “The articulatory setting of a language or dialect may differ from GB [General British]. So some languages like Spanish may have a tendency to hold the tongue more forward in the mouth, while others like Russian may have a tendency to hold it further back in the mouth. Nasalization may be characteristic of many speakers of American English, while denasal voice … is frequently said to occur in Liverpool" (p. 302). I remember that in the phonetic framework of Chomsky and Halle’s Sound Pattern of English (1968) some features are defined in terms of deviation from a hypothesized neutral position (unfortunately I can’t go into detail on this, as many years ago I lent my copy of this bizarre book to someone who never returned it). A similar account is seen in D. Odden’s Introducing Phonology (2005) “…some features are characterized in terms of the ‘neutral position’ which is a configuration that the vocal tract is assumed to have immediately prior to speaking. The neutral position, approximately that of the vowel [ɛ], defines relative movement of the tongue” (p 136). (Presumably we are to take this, as with Chomsky and Halle, as referring to English rather than to the world’s languages in general).
I would really like to breathe some life into this skeletal WP article, but I would like first to appeal for additional references or quotations that I could use, since I feel I may well be missing some interesting material in the literature. Please help!