Toward the development of articulatory signatures for intelligibility test words: Lingual kinematics

Abstract

The development of “normal” articulatory signatures for intelligibility test words should eventually permit highly specific designations of the articulatory basis of intelligibility deficits in persons with motor speech disorders. Our study of lingual kinematics for selected words, using x-ray microbeam data, suggests that a major obstacle to the construction of such signatures is the substantial interspeaker variability in pellet trajectories for a given word. This variability will be reported, ways in which it might be minimized will be discussed, and some analyses of relationships between lingual kinematics and vocalic formant trajectories will be described. One conclusion that has emerged from analyses to date is that typically used kinematic measurands such as peak velocity, instantaneous acceleration, and so forth, will not be very useful in the development of an articulatory signature. Rather, the unfolding of articulatory gestures over time must somehow be incorporated into the signature concept. [Work supported by NIH.]