Development of a normative baseline for speech stability in lingual articulation

Abstract

In typical speech production, speakers usually use the same articulatory gesture for a particular speech sound in a particular context (such as a /k/ sound after an /i/ vowel). However, since people are not machines, there is inherent variation in how precisely a speech gesture is repeated. Previous research on consistency of tongue articulation has found individual variation in articulatory consistency in tongue posture that may also provide insight into communication disorders, such as stuttering (Frisch et al., 2016, Clinical Linguistics and Phonetics). This presentation will report on pilot data for the development a normative measure for speech stability to establish how much variation is typical for different age groups and whether the complexity of speech materials influences the articulatory measure of speech stability. Included in the pilot methodology are (1) a wide variety of lingual consonants, (2) variation in vowel context, and (3) evaluation of a perceptual proxy measure for speech stability that could be practically used in a clinical environment.