Abstract
Recent research on body and head positions has shown that postural changes may induce varying degrees of changes on acoustic speech signals and articulatory gestures. While the preservation of formant profiles across different postures is suitably accounted for by the two-tube model and perturbation theory, it remains unclear whether it is resulted from the accommodation of tongue postures. Specifically, whether the tongue accommodates the changes in head angle to maintain the target acoustics is yet to be determined. The present study examines vowel acoustics and their correspondence with the articulatory maneuvers of the tongue, including both tongue postures and movements of the tongue center, across different head angles. The results show that vowel acoustics, including pitch and formants, are largely unaffected by upward or downward tilting of the head. These preserved acoustics may be attributed to the lingual gestures that compensate for the effects of gravity. Our results also reveal that the tongue postures in response to head movements appear to be vowel-dependent, and the tongue center may serve as an underlying drive that covariates with the head angle changes. These results imply a close relationship between vowel acoustics and tongue postures as well as a target-oriented strategy for different head angles.
Highlights
IntroductionSpeakers talk in an upright position with their eyes looking straight ahead
In most speech scenarios, speakers talk in an upright position with their eyes looking straight ahead
F0 and the two measured formants (F1 and F2) remained largely unaffected across the different head angles for all three vowels as depicted by the overlapped fitted contours in the generalized additive mixed models (GAMMs) results, Figure 3 presents the distribution of tongue centers across different head angles
Summary
Speakers talk in an upright position with their eyes looking straight ahead. This upright posture creates a turning angle in the upper vocal tract, separating it into two tubes: the lingual (front) and (pharyngo-)laryngeal (back) tubes. The direction of the frequency shift is frequency dependent (Félix et al, 2012) The acoustics of these curved ducts were largely established through the examination of hard walled materials or rigid ducts which are assumed not to absorb acoustic energy (Cabelli, 1980; Malbéqui et al, 1996). It is yet to be determined whether these factors would introduce any acoustic differences in speech quality
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