Interarticulator timing in a sentence production in young normal speakers and speakers with apraxia of speech.

Abstract

Apraxia of speech (AOS) is typically considered as characterized by kinematic timing problems among articulators; however, kinematic descriptions of such phenomenon are scarce. The goal of this study was to describe articulatory timing between the lips and jaw and the lips and tongue in young normal and AOS speakers across three speaking rates, using x‐ray microbeam data. Data of young normal speakers were taken from the x‐ray microbeam speech production database. Lip protrusion and tongue elevation timings were derived from the kinematic and acoustic data in the production of “too” in the sentence “The other one is too big” and lip and jaw closing timings for /b/ and /w/ were derived from the kinematic data of the same sentence. The temporal relationships between these articulatory movements in each event were then examined with consideration of the effect of speaking rate. The results are discussed in relation to the effect of speaking rate on interarticulator timing and interspeaker variability in interarticulator timing.