Individual Articulators Research Articles

Changes in gingival blood circulation in patients with provisional fixed acrylic dentures

The adhesion of oral microorganisms to the surface of teeth and dental restorative materials is often the starting point in the developments of caries and periodontal disease. Formation of biofilm on the surface provisional acrylic bridge is especially quickly and can potentially generate decay or periodontal disease on the teeth. Occlusion trauma and occlusion disorders effects on increasing of injure regional periodontal tissues. Using ultrasonic doppler diagnostics oral mucosal blood flow was measured in 79 patients with periodontitis of medium severity with different hygiene conditions before and during orthopedic treatment by provisional fixed dentures was model by different methods. According to the results of this study was stated optimization of oral mucosal blood flow after pre-prosthetic treatments and the supportive hygiene periodontal care during the treatment. Results was used for reduce of functional stress in the in periodontal tissues during the orthopedic alignment by the use of fixed dentures. Specific prosthodontic hygiene protocol and model by individual articulator must be used to treat patients with widespread chronic periodontitis by interim prostheses.

(ii) Shoulder and elbow imaging

Abstract The shoulder is a ball and socket joint, the stability of which is conferred predominantly by surrounding soft tissue. The majority of clinical symptoms in the shoulder are either instability related or impingement syndrome in the subacromial area. The elbow is a complex hinge joint with three individual articulations. It is surrounded by a number of tendons and, like the shoulder, joint stability is maintained by multiple ligaments. Trauma, tendinopathy and systemic diseases can affect the elbow joint. Imaging plays an invaluable role in patient management. The plain radiograph, although being a very useful baseline investigation having reasonable clinical use, has its limitations. The mainstay of shoulder and elbow imaging is US and MRI. The following article outlines common and slightly uncommon shoulder and elbow pathologies and their imaging appearances.

Resistance, Oil, and Awakening: Textual Responses to the Butler Strike and Its Aftermath

The 1937 Trinidad oil field labor uprising, commonly known as the Butler Strike, has come to be seen as a watershed moment in the nation’s history by the various poets and prose writers, indigenous and exogenous, who have sought to represent and define Trinidad as a place. Collectively, they present a broad conceptual range of Uriah Butlers (the strike’s leader or figurehead), as well as the events associated with his name. Their individual articulations of the Butler strike are conditioned by their overriding aesthetic projects, genres of choice, political ideologies, and subject positions. This paper argues that while there is no definitive textual Butler Strike, the ways that the strike and its major players are represented keenly evince authors’ ideas regarding Trinidad’s emerging postcolonial identity, Négritude /black power, and the confluences of class, racial, and anti-colonial struggle. From C.L.R. James’ would-be proletariat hero hampered by religious zealotry to Eric Roach’s Toussaint l’Ouverture manqué and V.S. Naipaul’s racial fanatic adrift in large historical currents he cannot successfully navigate or comprehend, Butler and the struggle he embodies are enduring subjects through which authors seek to comprehend in historical and cultural terms the complexities and contradictions of late colonial and early postcolonial Trinidad.

Un référentiel pour articuler les compétences stratégiques et individuelles

La question de l'articulation des competences individuelles et strategiques (pilotage des competences) attend de recevoir des reponses a la fois theoriques et operationnelles. Un des enjeux majeurs consiste dans la construction d'un referentiel commun pour tous les niveaux de la competence. En effet, meme si la GRH beneficie de tres nombreux referentiels, ils sont inoperants pour l'articulation : ils n'ont pas ete concus pour cette finalite mais pour l'evaluation des competences individuelles. Ainsi, le referentiel propose devra etre capable de servir une double finalite de pilotage et d'evaluation des competences. L'etude de cas comparative realisee ici vise precisement a proposer des elements de reponse originaux a cette finalite.

The Individuated Collective Utterance: Lack, Law and Desire in the Autobiographies of Ellen Kuzwayo and Sindiwe Magona

Summary This article signposts the discussion of autobiographical selfing through figures of cultural memory that are a function of double consciousness and double temporality. Two exemplary autobiographies, one by Ellen Kuzwayo and one by Sindiwe Magona, are shown to evince complex ontological formations between which the gap in representing the self of experience and the writing self is radically repeated in the multiplicity of individual articulation of collective agency. The paradox of individual-collective articulation bespeaks the “gap” of writing in double temporality. The article explores that “gap” between Darstellung and Vertretung1 on the premise that it evocatively refers to the slippage or instability of “Truth” written from the exergue of margins of the borderline texts of remembrance in the autobiographies of two black women. For these women's writing runs parallel – and gives testimony – to their central involvement in the urban township communities as social workers and mothers or, if you will, private and public figures. In this politicised private-public dialectical movement, the autobiographies under discussion take on a Kafkaesque dimension of what Deleuze & Guattari (1986) consistently call a “minor literature”. The article ultimately brings to view the extent to which the mark of history as a territorial machine is inscribed upon the body of the autobiographical subject, and how it produces a representational crisis that unwittingly provides – rather than strictly regulates – the conditions of possibility for even more radical memoric testimony to history and becoming in self-writing. 1Jill Arnott uses Spivak's delineation of the two concepts to demonstrate the difference between the “I” that experiences and the “I” who in the retelling (Darstellung) represents (Vertreten) to show the implications for the representation of the relationship between being and knowing as each applies to black and white women (Arnott 1996: 86).

Kinematic analysis of articulatory coupling in acquired apraxia of speech post-stroke

Primary objective: Electromagnetic articulography was employed to investigate the strength of articulatory coupling and hence the degree of functional movement independence between individual articulators in apraxia of speech (AOS).Methods and procedures: Tongue-tip, tongue-back and jaw movement was recorded from five speakers with AOS and a concomitant aphasia (M= 53.6 years; SD = 12.60) during /ta, sa, la, ka/ syllable repetitions, spoken at typical and fast rates of speech. Covariance values were calculated for each articulatory pair to gauge the strength of articulatory coupling. The results obtained for each of the participants with AOS were individually compared to those obtained by a control group (n= 12; M= 52.08 years; SD = 12.52). Comparisons were made between the typical rate productions of the control group and the typical and fast rate productions of the participants with AOS.Main outcomes and results: In comparison to the control group, four speakers with AOS exhibited significantly stronger articulatory coupling for alveolar and/or velar speech targets, during typical and/or fast rate conditions, suggesting decreased functional movement independence.Conclusions: The reduction in functional movement independence might have reflected an attempt to simplify articulatory control or a decrease in the ability to differentially control distinct articulatory regions.

A triad of Filipino adolescents’ zones of lived experiences of information and communications technology (ICT)

Considering that today’s students feel extremely more comfortable with computers than did earlier generations of students vis-a-vis the notion that, as a social category, they have become one of the most interesting topics in research papers and journals in the field of behavioral and social sciences since the 1950s (Batan 2002), their individual and collective experiences of information and communications technology (ICT) could be expected to create a portrait of accounts that might inform educational policy makers as to how their ICT needs and concerns could be better addressed through a more responsive and a well-defined IT-driven educational platform. The central question that this phenomenological study purported to answer was: “How does a select group of Filipino adolescents collectively experience information and communications technology (ICT)?” Findings of this study revealed that the individual and collective articulations, verbalizations, and musings of the 60 adolescents recruited from two regions in the Philippines exposed three distinct but interrelated conceptual zones of ICT, namely: the zone of technology perspective (ZTP), zone of technology power and efficacy (ZTPE), and zone of technology deficits (ZTD). Implications of the study are also discussed in the paper. “There is a demand for qualitative research with an insider perspective, as young voices appear not to have been sufficiently heard.” (Hauan and Heggli 2002:13)

Intra-participant variability in Parkinson's disease: An electropalatographic examination of articulation

The articulation of individuals with dysarthria has traditionally been described as consistent. However, conflicting findings have resulted from research examining intra-participant variation in the articulation of individuals with Parkinson's disease (PD) and hypokinetic dysarthria. The current study used electropalatography (EPG) to examine the degree of intra-participant variation in both tongue-palate contact patterns and duration of contact in a group of speakers with PD and hypokinetic dysarthria including consonant imprecision (n = 8). The study also aimed to determine if ageing contributed to any articulatory instability observed. Therefore, two control groups were employed consisting of aged adult (n = 7) and young adult (n = 8) speakers respectively. Participants were asked to read aloud the phrase “I saw a CVC today” were C = /t/, /s/, and /l/ and V = /a/. Intra-participant variation in tongue-palate contact was measured using the absolute and relative variability indexes. Coefficients of varia...

Interarticulator cohesion within coronal consonant production

If more than one articulator is involved in the execution of a phonetic task, then the individual articulators have to be temporally coordinated with each other in a lawful manner. The present study aims at analyzing tongue-jaw cohesion in the temporal domain for the German coronal consonants [s, f, t, d, n, l], i.e., consonants produced with the same set of articulators--the tongue blade and the jaw--but differing in manner of articulation. The stability of obtained interaction patterns is evaluated by varying the degree of vocal effort: comfortable and loud. Tongue and jaw movements of five speakers of German were recorded by means of electromagnetic midsagittal articulography (EMMA) during [aCa] sequences. The results indicate that (1) tongue-jaw coordination varies with manner of articulation, i.e., a later onset and offset of the jaw target for the stops compared to the fricatives, the nasal and the lateral; (2) the obtained patterns are stable across vocal effort conditions; (3) the sibilants are produced with smaller standard deviations for latencies and target positions; and (4) adjustments to the lower jaw positions during the surrounding vowels in loud speech occur during the closing and opening movement intervals and not the consonantal target phases.

Reproducibility of jaw movements in patients with craniomandibular disorders

It has never been investigated, if mandibular movements of patients with craniomandibular disorders (CMD) result in a lower reproducibility of dynamic functional parameters which are used for the individual articulator setting. The aim of the present study was to compare the reproducibility of electronically registered functional parameters in patients with CMD and in a control group. Dynamic functional parameters were recorded in 30 patients and 30 volunteers with a computerized ultrasound system (ARCUSdigma). The whole registration was performed three times during one session and three times at a second session 1 week later. The horizontal condylar inclination in the patient group gave a standard deviation of 2.17 degrees +/- 0.95 degrees , indicating poorer reproducibility than in the volunteer group, for which the standard deviation was 1.37 degrees +/- 0.42 degrees . The reproducibility of measurements of the Bennett angle was also poorer in the patient group than in the volunteer group, with standard deviations of 1.70 degrees +/- 0.62 degrees and 1.22 degrees +/- 0.40 degrees , respectively. The standard deviations calculated for determination of incisal inclination during laterotrusion was 3.02 degrees +/- 1.49 degrees for patients and 2.30 degrees +/- 1.17 degrees for volunteers. The standard deviations for incisal inclination during protrusion was 2.02 degrees +/- 0.95 degrees for patients and 2.06 degrees +/- 1.82 degrees for volunteers. The reproducibility of measurement of horizontal condylar inclination, Bennett angle and incisal inclination during laterotrusion therefore showed significantly lower reproducibility in the patient group than in the volunteer group (P < 0.05). The overall reproducibility of the measurements was nevertheless good in both groups, with standard deviations under 3.1 degrees , so that an individual setting of an articulator seems useful even in patients with CMD.

Kinematics of normal lingual diadokokinesis

Speech-language clinicians use diadochokinetic (DDK) tasks as a behavioral measure of the status of the speech production system. The articulator kinematics of these repetitive syllable productions has been relatively little studied (most studies of speech DDK have been acoustic). As a result, many clinicians misunderstand the relationship between syllable rate and movement parameters, such as rate of articulator movement and range of articulator movement. For example, clinicians assume that because ‘‘kuh’’ syllable repetitions are relatively slow, tongue dorsum movements must be slow. However, Westbury and Dembowski [Ann. Bull. RILP No. 27 (1993)] showed that the tongue dorsum may produce larger and faster movements than other tongue points (such as the tongue tip). Therefore, syllable repetition rates may not reflect movement speeds for individual articulator points. This study replicates and extends these findings, using a larger speaker sample encompassing a wider age range. The goal of this study is to further clarify the relationship between articulator speed, range of articulator motion, and syllable rate. That is, it seeks to examine whether syllable rate is related to how quickly the tongue moves or how far the tongue moves. Data are derived from the University of Wisconsin X-ray Microbeam Database.

An evaluation of phonetic working space in normal geriatrics and persons with motor speech disorders

Speakers with dysarthria seem to have smaller than normal phonetic working spaces. Their vowels exhibit unusual and often reduced formant transitions and slopes, and areas enclosed by their ‘‘vowel locations’’ plotted in an (F1,F2) plane are abnormally small. Presumably, reduced formant transitions reflect small movements of individual articulators. Reduced lip and jaw movements have been reported for speakers with Parkinson’s disease and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. However, comparable reports for tongue movement are not available. In this study, x-ray microbeam data were used to compare the acoustic and articulatory phonetic working spaces of neurologically normal and dysarthric speakers. Measurements of formant frequencies, and sagittal-plane locations of tongue fleshpoints, were made for the English vowels /i ae a u/ at the temporal midpoint of the vowel nucleus in three different words for each of ten normal and seven dysarthric speakers. Speakers’ articulatory phonetic working spaces were defined as areas enclosed by tongue fleshpoint locations. Data obtained from this study provide an enhanced appreciation of the articulatory bases of acoustic features of dysarthric speech. [Work supported by 1-R01-DC03723.]

Visions and Voices

considering the ways that'... the idea of Indian-ness worked variously to train territorial expansion and to supplement and stabilize both corporate and individual articulations of national manhood'. Chapter three analyzes Samuel G. Morton's debate with John Bachman over polygenesis, skilfully linking the construction of race to'.. . professional competition for cultural authority on behalf of manhood'. Chapter four discusses the emergence of professional gynaecology, arguing that it worked hand in hand with nineteenth-century racial science '. . . in their mutually reassuring stabilization of manhood and professional masculinity'. Nelson crafts, in short, a neat and perhaps too schematic symmetry between the construction of white, middle-class professional men and their relationship to various 'others': Native Americans, blacks, women. Nelson's study concludes with an excavation of the political psychology of middle-class and professional fraternal rituals, which, she charges, reveal the high human costs of pursuing the national ideal of manhood. Nelson's scholarship is adventurous, her arguments provocative, even when the historical basis for her claims seems somewhat suspect. Her critique of 'white manhood', for example, seems posited on the belief that this historical process somehow foreclosed or short-circuited '... nascently radical, local democratic practices, energies, and imaginings, not replacing local manhoods so much as enlisting them for and orienting them toward a unified, homogeneous national ideal'. She returns to this issue in her Afterward, an extended discussion and critique of 'presidentialism', a term she uses to signify the ways in which Americans invest their hopes for American life in a single, paternal figure rather than investing their energies in pursuing alternative and messier democratic practices. In her introduction, Dana Nelson announces: 'I want National Manhood to disturb the concrete referentiality of that term white man, bumping aside the abstraction in ways that let us begin considering the profound diversity of people who fit that label....' She certainly succeeds in bumping the term around and, like Jacobson, she offers a graphic portrait of the social and pyschological havoc it has left in its wake. If the utopian desires for a different America, freed from the shadows of its racial history, are ever to be achieved, works such as these will play an important part in helping readers to imagine that future.

Adjustments in kinematic parameters of bilabial articulatory gestures during repeated oral readings of the same passage

Repetitive practice of nonspeech motor acts typically results in behavioral, kinematic, and kinetic changes that reflect underlying neuromotor adjustments (motor learning). The effects of repetitive performance on the organization of speech movements, however, are less well understood. Yet, knowledge of such effects could (1) contribute to important theoretical notions in speech motor control, (2) reveal methodological concerns with currently used research paradigms, and (3) provide additional theoretical and clinical insights into speech disorders that are positively affected by repetitive practice. The present study therefore investigated the effects of repeated oral readings of a single passage on kinematic parameters of bilabial articulatory gestures (only closing gestures are discussed here). Seven adults, all normal speakers, performed five readings of a 200-word passage containing five instances of each of three target words. Movements of the lips and jaw were transduced with a strain gauge system whereas articulation rate was determined acoustically. All subjects increased articulation rate from reading 1 to reading 5. Kinematic adjustments were more consistently found (across subjects and target words) for a derived signal representing lip aperture than for movements of the individual articulators. Preliminary analyses suggest that some adjustments may be mediated by phonetic context and/or syllable stress.

Coarticulation of tongue and jaw movements in speech

Coarticulatory patterns in speech movements arise from the interaction of neural control signals with mechanical and geometrical properties of vocal tract structures. By determining those aspects of the biomechanical system that are compensated for in neural signals, it can be learned what the nervous system ‘‘knows’’ abouts its own dynamics. Previous work has shown that coarticulatory patterns in jaw movement may arise as a consequence of muscle properties and dynamics rather than characteristics of the neural code [Ostry, Gribble, and Gracco, J. Neurosci. (1996)]. This finding suggests that the nervous system may take limited account of orofacial dynamics in planning speech movements. However, in the case of interarticulator coarticulation, mechanical interaction among articulators may necessitate a more complex pattern of control. As a first step in assessing the characteristics of control signals that underlie interarticulator patterning, kinematic patterns of coarticulation in the tongue and jaw are reported on. Patterns of individual articulator motion as well as interarticulator spatial and temporal relationships will be described. [Research supported by National Institute of Deafness and Other Communication Disorders Grant No. DC-00594, NSERC (Canada), and FCAR (Quebec).]

The organization of articulator gestures: A comparison of Swedish, Bulgarian, and Greenlandic

This paper reports speech articulator gestures in Swedish, Bulgarian, and Greenlandic to study universal and language-specific components in articulation. This work is based on analysis of movements of individual articulators from x-ray motion films of speech, and continues from previous reports from this study by Wood [J. Phon. 7, 25–43 (1979); 19, 281–292 (1991); Proc. 3rd Conf. I.C.P.L.A., 191–200, Helsinki (1994); Proc. 13th I.C.Ph.S. Vol. 1, 392–395, Stockholm (1995); J. Phon. 24, 139–164 (1996); Proc. 4th Speech Prod. Sem., 61–64, Grenoble (1996); Speech Commun., (in press)], and by Wood and Pettersson [Folia Ling. 22, 239–262 (1988)]. Common principles concerned utilization and integration of articulator gestures (articulator gestures executed in approach, hold, and withdrawal phases, four tongue body gestures used, all gestures available for vowels and consonants, gesture conflicts resolved by gesture queuing, coarticulation and assimilations implemented by coproduction). Language-specific principles concerned implementation of assimilations like palatalization of alveolar stops in Bulgarian and uvularization of vowels in Greenlandic. One assimilation, palatalization of velar consonants, is common to all three languages. A model of gesture programming based on these results is proposed.

The gestural organization of vowels: A cinefluorographic study of articulator gestures in Greenlandic

Movements of individual articulators are analyzed to elucidate principles of gestural organization in vowels. Procedures for tracking articulator gestures from x-ray motion films, and results obtained on coarticulation in Swedish, Bulgarian, and Greenlandic are reported in Wood [J. Phon. 19, 281–292 (1991); Proc. 3rd Congr. I. C. P. L. A. 191–200, Helsinki (1994); Proc. 13th I. C. Ph. Sc. 1, 392–395, Stockholm (1995); J. Phon. 24, 139–164 (1996); Proc. 4th Speech Prod. Seminar 61–64, Grenoble (1996)]. Tongue body movement was organized as predicted from a spectrographic study of Greenlandic vowels in Wood [Working Papers 4, 58–94, Lund (1971)] and according to the principles reported for English and Arabic in Wood [J. Phon. 7, 25–43 (1979)]. Greenlandic has three vowel phonemes, but the allophonic variation means all four tongue body gestures (palatal, velar, uvular, pharyngeal) are utilized. All articulator gestures needed for a vowel converged on a typical configuration, those arriving earlier being held until all were in position. The configuration was held briefly before the articulators were withdrawn. Coarticulation was organized by queuing oncoming gestures that are antagonistic to current gestures, avoiding conflicts.

Towards a 'Friday' Model of International Trade: A Feminist Deconstruction of Race and Gender Bias in the Robinson Crusoe Trade Allegory

A feminist deconstruction of the Robinson Crusoe trade allegory reveals the race and gender biases inherent in four assumptions underlying neoclassical economics and trade theory: Homo Economicus; freedom of choice; absence of barriers to switching labor and pursuing self-interest; and uniformity of the nation. Examples from the electronics and garment industries illustrate that socially constructed race and gender identities mediate an individual's articulation into the economy. A 'Friday' trade allegory, based on the relationship between Crusoe and Friday in the original novel, which explicitly recognizes the trade implications of racialized and gendered labor, is argued to provide a more relevant trade model.

The supraglottal articulation of prominence in English: linguistic stress as localized hyperarticulation.

The results of an articulatory investigation of the supraglottal correlates of linguistic prominence in English, and a proposal of a unified description of linguistic stress are reported. Three models of stress are evaluated: that prominence expands jaw movement, that stress expands an abstract articulatory scale involving the opening and closing of the vocal tract, and that stress involves a localized shift toward hyperarticulate speech. A corpus of x-ray microbeam records of sensible speech is studied, within which the stress pattern is controlled and is checked by means of an intonational analysis. Jaw movement data yield similar results to earlier studies, but kinematic differences interpreted with reference to a gestural theory suggest that different subjects use different articulatory strategies to articulate stress contrasts. In addition, the jaw, lip, and tongue interact in the articulation of stress in subject dependent ways. Thus the articulation of stress should be formulated in terms of abstract articulatory goals, rather than in terms of individual articulator positioning. Finally, the data show that stress affects the articulation of nonsonority distinctions such as backness in vowels and point of articulation in consonants. A hyperarticulation model of stress is discussed in terms of these results.

Control of Robotic Manipulators Using the Solutions of Repeated Direct Kinematics.

Robotic manipulators are generally controlled by individual articulation of each robot. Thus, robotic operations defined by working coordinates must be translated into articulation coordinates for each robot. This translation from working coordinates to articulation coordinates generally requires solution of inverse kinematics of the robot. However, the inverse kinematics of the robot sometimes cannot provide a solution due to its complexity. This paper shows a new method for controlling the robot using the solutions of repeated direct kinematics instead of inverse kinematics of the robot, and shows that the solution of repeated direct kinematics is equivalent to the solution of the inverse kinematics of the robot. Furthermore it is also shown experimentally that this method is applicable to the control of position and force of the robot.