Some interesting things you can do with your tongue

Abstract

The tongue assumes, with speed and accuracy, a variety of positions during speech. In order to do so, its control mechanisms presumably possess detailed knowledge of the relation between muscle action and tongue position. Although the general nature of such knowledge may be inferred from the behavior of the tongue during speech, we wondered if the tongue's capabilities might be most directly explored by requiring subjects to produce arbitrary tongue positions in nonspeech tasks of varying complexity. A custom‐built device required subjects to move to a light rod into various target positions with the tongue tip. Preliminary results reveal a remarkably high degree of skill, even for a complex “transposition of interval” task. The results suggest that the sensory information regarding tongue position is essentially linear and that in spite of differences in degree of muscle activity for different degrees of extension, the control mechanisms can produce a nearly linear continuum of positions. [Supported by Fulbright‐Hays Fellowship and Department of Phonetics.]