Dynamics of Vowel Articulation

Abstract

The dynamics of vowel articulation was studied by simultaneously monitoring articulator muscle activity, movement, and acoustic output while a single speaker produced multiple repetitions of 10 different vowels in a / pVp/ environment. Analysis of the data from the three measurement levels provided a complete physiological description of the subject's vowel space and showed good agreement among the different levels of description. Intra-articulator timing measurements, e.g., the relationship between posterior genioglossus EMG activity and tongue movements, and inter-articulator timing measurements, e.g., the relationship between tongue and lip movements, indicated a differentiation in the timing of tongue movement components. Vowel-related vertical tongue movements always began at about the moments of implosion for the initial stop. Horizontal movements associated with front vowels began at the same time as vertical movements, whereas horizontal movements associated with back vowels began earlier, at the onset of the syllable. For certain vowel environments, tongue and other articulator anticipatory gestures were found to be linguistically significant since listeners were able to correctly label the vowel when presented with only the schwa segment of the syllable.