Articulatory System Research Articles

What is occlusion? Part 2.

Some dentists choose to ignore the subject of occlusion, while others propose a set of doctrinal rules. It is of little wonder therefore that it can become a source of confusion and even controversy. This series of two papers aims, firstly, to answer the very simple question of 'what is occlusion?'. It will put occlusion into the context of the articulatory system because that is the bio-mechanical environment where the majority of dentists do their work. The concept of jaw relation will also be discussed but within the context of this locomotive system. Ideal occlusion will be described but only after answering the question: for whom or what might an occlusion be considered ideal? Although, in the book of which this is the first chapter, he presents what has worked for him during many years as a general dental practitioner, university lecturer and specialist in restorative dentistry, he has tried not to be didactic because he feels that, in a profession, there are no right answers, only the right questions.

What is occlusion? Part 1.

Some dentists choose to ignore the subject of occlusion, while others propose a set of doctrinal rules. It is of little wonder therefore that it can become a source of confusion and even controversy. This series of two papers aims, firstly, to answer the very simple question of 'what is occlusion?'. It will put occlusion into the context of the articulatory system because that is the bio-mechanical environment where the majority of dentists do their work. The concept of jaw relation will also be discussed but within the context of this locomotive system. Ideal occlusion will be described but only after answering the question: for whom or what might an occlusion be considered ideal? Although, in the book of which this is the first chapter, he presents what has worked for him during many years as a general dental practitioner, university lecturer and specialist in restorative dentistry, he has tried not to be didactic because he feels that, in a profession, there are no right answers, only the right questions.

Production of emotions conveyed by voice in Parkinson's disease: Association between variability of fundamental frequency and gray matter volumes of regions involved in emotional prosody.

Parkinson's disease (PD) is associated with impairment in producing emotions conveyed by voice which could depend on motor limitations of the vocal apparatus and/or alterations in emotional processing. This study explores the relationship between the standard deviation of fundamental frequency (F0SD) of emotional speech and the volume of specific gray matter regions. Fifteen PD patients and 15 healthy controls (HC) were asked to produce different emotions vocally elicited by reading short stories. For each vocal track, the F0SD was calculated as index of variability. All subjects underwent a structural magnetic resonance imaging and a voxel-based morphometry analysis. An ad hoc mask of brain regions implicated in emotional prosody was constructed to test the relationship between F0SD and the level of brain atrophy. PD patients showed lower F0SD values than HC in the expression of anger. Neuroimaging results showed brain atrophy in PD patients in a widespread bilateral network, including frontal areas, left cingulate cortex, parietal areas as well as occipital cortices. In the PD group, a positive correlation was observed between F0SD values of anger and volumes of the bilateral supramarginal gyrus, left thalamus, right inferior frontal gyrus, and amygdala. The lower F0SD values observed in PD patients in anger production are consistent with their lower ability to express anger effectively through voice compared to HC. Our data demonstrated the involvement of right-lateralized areas, such as the inferior frontal gyrus and amygdala, which are typically involved in emotional prosody. Disturbances in emotion processing might contribute to speech production deficits in PD, probably in addition to the motor impairment of the articulatory system. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Relationships between tooth wear, bruxism and temporomandibular disorders.

This article will provide an overview of the diagnosis of common temporomandibular disorders (TMDs) and bruxism, along with their relevance in management of tooth wear. When assessing and managing a tooth wear case, the teeth should not be considered in isolation, but as part of the articulatory system, which has three inter-related elements: the teeth, the temporomandibular joints and the masticatory muscles. The presence/absence of bruxism and TMD are highly relevant, although there may not be a causal relationship between these. A consideration of TMD and bruxism, together with the potential impact these may have on the patient during and after any management of tooth wear, will form part of patient education and the informed consent process.

Functional Role of Temporal Patterning of Articulation in Speech Production: A Novel Perspective Toward Global Timing-Based Motor Speech Assessment and Rehabilitation.

This study aimed to (a) relate temporal patterning of articulation to functional speech outcomes in neurologically healthy and impaired speakers, (b) identify changes in temporal patterning of articulation in neurologically impaired speakers, and (c) evaluate how these changes can be modulated by speaking rate manipulation. Thirteen individuals with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) and 10 neurologically healthy controls read a sentence 3 times, first at their habitual rate and then at a voluntarily slowed rate. Temporal patterning of articulation was assessed by 24 features characterizing the modulation patterns within (intra) and between (inter) four articulators (tongue tip, tongue body, lower lip, and jaw) at three linguistically relevant, hierarchically nested timescales corresponding to stress, syllable, and onset-rime/phoneme. For Aim 1, the features for the habitual rate condition were factorized and correlated with two functional speech outcomes-speech intelligibility and intelligible speaking rate. For Aims 2 and 3, the features were compared between groups and rate conditions, respectiely. For Aim 1, the modulation features combined were moderately to strongly correlated with intelligibility (R 2 = .51-.53) and intelligible speaking rate (R 2 = .63-.73). For Aim 2, intra-articulator modulation was impaired in ALS, manifested by moderate-to-large decreases in modulation depth at all timescales and cross-timescale phase synchronization. Interarticulator modulation was relatively unaffected. For Aim 3, voluntary rate reduction improved several intra-articulator modulation features identified as being susceptible to the disease effect in individuals with ALS. Disrupted temporal patterning of articulation, presumably reflecting impaired articulatory entrainment to linguistic rhythms, may contribute to functional speech declines in ALS. These impairments tend to be improved through voluntary rate reduction, possibly by reshaping the temporal template of motor plans to better accommodate the disease-related neuromechanical constraints in the articulatory system. These findings shed light on a novel perspective toward global timing-based motor speech assessment and rehabilitation.

Design, Manufacture, and Acceptance Evaluation of APO: A Lip-syncing Social Robot Developed for Lip-reading Training Programs.

Lack of educational facilities for the burgeoning world population, financial barriers, and the growing tendency in favor of inclusive education have all helped channel a general inclination toward using various educational assistive technologies, e.g., socially assistive robots. Employing social robots in diverse educational scenarios could enhance learners’ achievements by motivating them and sustaining their level of engagement. This study is devoted to manufacturing and investigating the acceptance of a novel social robot named APO, designed to improve hearing-impaired individuals’ lip-reading skills through an educational game. To accomplish the robot’s objective, we proposed and implemented a lip-syncing system on the APO social robot. The proposed robot’s potential with regard to its primary goals, tutoring and practicing lip-reading, was examined through two main experiments. The first experiment was dedicated to evaluating the clarity of the utterances articulated by the robot. The evaluation was quantified by comparing the robot’s articulation of words with a video of a human teacher lip-syncing the same words. In this inspection, due to the adults’ advanced skill in lip-reading compared to children, twenty-one adult participants were asked to identify the words lip-synced in the two scenarios (the articulation of the robot and the video recorded from the human teacher). Subsequently, the number of words that participants correctly recognized from the robot and the human teacher articulations was considered a metric to evaluate the caliber of the designed lip-syncing system. The outcome of this experiment revealed that no significant differences were observed between the participants’ recognition of the robot and the human tutor’s articulation of multisyllabic words. Following the validation of the proposed articulatory system, the acceptance of the robot by a group of hearing-impaired participants, eighteen adults and sixteen children, was scrutinized in the second experiment. The adults and the children were asked to fill in two standard questionnaires, UTAUT and SAM, respectively. Our findings revealed that the robot acquired higher scores than the lip-syncing video in most of the questionnaires’ items, which could be interpreted as a greater intention of utilizing the APO robot as an assistive technology for lip-reading instruction among adults and children.

Temporomandibular joint anatomy, function and clinical relevance.

The articulatory system comprises the temporomandibular joints (TMJs), intra-articular discs, mandibular/jaw muscles and occlusion. In the simplest terms, the TMJ is the articulation between the upper and lower jaws. The teeth form the contacts between the upper and lower jaws and the muscles are the motors that move the mandible. This system is unique in that the TMJs are paired; any stimulus that affects one joint or any other single part of the articulatory system can have a 'knock-on effect' in the rest of the system.It is important to have a good understanding of anatomy, not only to be able to differentiate between what is physiological and what is pathological, but also to understand the objectives of some treatment options. Sound knowledge of anatomy is essential and an appreciation of the anatomical features associated with the TMJ can serve as a foundation for understanding the clinical management of temporomandibular disorders.This article reviews the functional anatomical features of the articulatory system with a look at the clinical significance of this anatomy.

ФОНЕТИЧЕСКАЯ ИНТЕРФЕРЕНЦИЯ КАК ПРОБЛЕМА ВЗАИМОДЕЙСТВИЯ ДВУХ ИЗУЧАЕМЫХ ЯЗЫКОВ: ИСПАНСКИЙ НА БАЗЕ АНГЛИЙСКОГО

The article discusses the problem of phonetic interference and examines it as an interesting linguistic phenomenon faced by the students studying Spanish as the second foreign language with regard of the acquired knowledge in English. The author presents an overview or the main scientific approaches to the definition and the description of the concept «linguistic interference» existing in modern linguistics. The types and levels of the process have been highlighted. The most detailed consideration has been given to the level of phonetic interference, being usually manifested as segmental and non-segmental. In the practical part of the research presented in this article we mainly discuss the problems of teaching Spanish phonetics taking into account the competencies acquired within the first practical phonetics course in English. In view of which the process of the secondary interference appearing as a result of the overlay of one articulatory system onto another has been presented and described in details. We analyze a number of natural phonetic mistakes made by the students speaking Spanish at the initial stage of the Practical Spanish course in terms of comparison of English and Spanish phonetic systems. Along with this we compare a group of alphabetically equal English and Spanish phonemes and single out their articulatory peculiarities which can help to explain the essence and the background of the process of English-Spanish interference in the context of the learning situation. As a result a number of methodological recommendations aimed to prevent and minimize this type of interferential mistakes have been developed.

The mental representation of sounds in speech sound disorders

The objective of this study is to investigate facets of the human phonological system in an attempt to elucidate the special nature of mental representations and operations underlying some of the errors in speech sound disorders (SSDs). After examining different theories on the mental representations of sounds and their organization in SSDs, we arrive at the conclusion that the existing elucidations on the phonological representations do not suffice to explain some distinctive facets of SSDs. Here, we endorse a hypothesis in favor of representationalism but offer an alternative conceptualization of the phonological representations (PR). We argue that the PR is to be understood in terms of a phonological base that holds information about a segment’s acoustic structure, and which interacts with other levels in the speech sound system in the mind so as to produce a certain sound. We also propose that the PR is connected to an interface module which mediates interactions between the PR and the articulatory system (AS) responsible for the physical manifestation of speech sounds in real time by way of the coordination of activities of speech organs in the vocal tract. We specifically consider different stages of operations within the interface, a specialized system within the cognitive system, which can explain patterns in the SSD data that have so far remained elusive. Positioned between the PR and the AS, the interface module is the heart of the current study. The presence of an interface module is necessitated by the fact that not all errors of SSDs are explainable in terms of structural, motor or even the symbolic misrepresentations at the level of PR. The interface acts as a mediating system mapping sound representations onto articulatory instructions for the actual production of sounds. The interface module can receive, process, and share the phonological inputs with other levels within the speech sound system. We believe an interface module such as ours holds the key to explaining at least certain speech disarticulations in SSDs.

A Simple Speech Production System Based on Formant Estimation of a Tongue Articulatory System Using Human Tongue Orientation

An algorithm for a potentially non-obtrusive speech production system was developed and characterized. The algorithm is primarily based on the articulation of the human tongue referred as tongue articulatory system (TAS) and was cascaded with a previously developed laryngeal model. We developed and optimized statistical formulae for formants of vowels and consonants and studied the model for different ages and genders. The difference between the formant frequencies obtained using both the established vocal tract system and proposed cascaded system was found to be < 5%. The proposed model shows the significance of the articulatory nature of the tongue in human speech production. An algorithmic speech synthesizer was developed, and its output was matched with original speech signals for English vowels and consonants with an Normalized Root-Mean-Square deviation error (NRMSE) of < 0.15ms. Further, an experimental implementation of the developed algorithm was done, with flex-sensors emulating the tongue in an artificial oral cavity. The experimental test results further confirmed the effectiveness of the algorithm, revealing interesting features under tolerance analyses. This idea relates to a means for compensating for a whole or partial loss of speech. Such a model can be useful to interpret speech for tracheostomised patients who have undergone larynx surgery, speech-disabled due to accidents or voice disorders, medical rehabilitation and for robotics.

Electrophysiological Dynamics of Visual Speech Processing and the Role of Orofacial Effectors for Cross-Modal Predictions.

The human brain generates predictions about future events. During face-to-face conversations, visemic information is used to predict upcoming auditory input. Recent studies suggest that the speech motor system plays a role in these cross-modal predictions, however, usually only audio-visual paradigms are employed. Here we tested whether speech sounds can be predicted on the basis of visemic information only, and to what extent interfering with orofacial articulatory effectors can affect these predictions. We registered EEG and employed N400 as an index of such predictions. Our results show that N400's amplitude was strongly modulated by visemic salience, coherent with cross-modal speech predictions. Additionally, N400 ceased to be evoked when syllables' visemes were presented backwards, suggesting that predictions occur only when the observed viseme matched an existing articuleme in the observer's speech motor system (i.e., the articulatory neural sequence required to produce a particular phoneme/viseme). Importantly, we found that interfering with the motor articulatory system strongly disrupted cross-modal predictions. We also observed a late P1000 that was evoked only for syllable-related visual stimuli, but whose amplitude was not modulated by interfering with the motor system. The present study provides further evidence of the importance of the speech production system for speech sounds predictions based on visemic information at the pre-lexical level. The implications of these results are discussed in the context of a hypothesized trimodal repertoire for speech, in which speech perception is conceived as a highly interactive process that involves not only your ears but also your eyes, lips and tongue.

Effects of an intensive voice treatment on articulatory function and speech intelligibility in children with motor speech disorders: A phase one study

Producing speech that is clear, audible, and intelligible to others is a challenge for many children with cerebral palsy (CP) and children with Down syndrome (DS). Previous studies have demonstrated the effectiveness of using the Lee Silverman Voice Treatment (LSVT LOUD®) to increase vocal loudness and improve speech intelligibility in individuals with dysarthria secondary to Parkinson’s disease (PD), and some research suggests that it also may be effective for individuals with dysarthria secondary to other conditions, including CP and DS. Although LSVT LOUD targets healthy vocal loudness, there is some evidence of spreading effects to the articulatory system. Acoustic data from two groups of children with secondary motor speech disorders [one with CP (n = 17) and one with DS (n = 9)] who received a full dose of LSVT LOUD and for whom post-treatment intelligibility gains have been previously reported, were analyzed for treatment effects on: 1) vowel duration, 2) acoustic vowel space and 3) the ratio of F2/i/ to F2/u/. Statistically significant changes in vowel duration and acoustic vowel space occurred pre-treatment to 12 weeks post-treatment in the CP group, and increased acoustic vowel space was observed in 5 of the DS participants. The present study provides preliminary evidence of intensive voice treatment spreading effects to the articulatory system in some children with CP and children with DS consistent with previous findings in other populations.

Auditory-Articulatory Neural Alignment between Listener and Speaker during Verbal Communication.

Whether auditory processing of speech relies on reference to the articulatory motor information of speaker remains elusive. Here, we addressed this issue under a two-brain framework. Functional magnetic resonance imaging was applied to record the brain activities of speakers when telling real-life stories and later of listeners when listening to the audio recordings of these stories. Based on between-brain seed-to-voxel correlation analyses, we revealed that neural dynamics in listeners' auditory temporal cortex are temporally coupled with the dynamics in the speaker's larynx/phonation area. Moreover, the coupling response in listener's left auditory temporal cortex follows the hierarchical organization for speech processing, with response lags in A1+, STG/STS, and MTG increasing linearly. Further, listeners showing greater coupling responses understand the speech better. When comprehension fails, such interbrain auditory-articulation coupling vanishes substantially. These findings suggest that a listener's auditory system and a speaker's articulatory system are inherently aligned during naturalistic verbal interaction, and such alignment is associated with high-level information transfer from the speaker to the listener. Our study provides reliable evidence supporting that references to the articulatory motor information of speaker facilitate speech comprehension under a naturalistic scene.

Study of articulators’ contribution and compensation during speech by articulatory speech recognition

In this paper, the contributions of dynamic articulatory information were evaluated by using an articulatory speech recognition system. The Electromagnetic Articulographic dataset is relatively small and hard to be recorded compared with popular speech corpora used for modern speech study. We used articulatory data to study the contribution of each observation channel of vocal tracts in speech recognition by DNN framework. We also analyzed the recognition results of each phoneme according to speech production rules. The contribution rate of each articulator can be considered as the crucial level of each phoneme in speech production. Furthermore, the results indicate that the contribution of each observation point is not relevant to a specific method. The tendency of a contribution of each sensor is identical to the rules of Japanese phonology. In this work, we also evaluated the compensation effect between different channels. We discovered that crucial points are hard to be compensated for compared with non-crucial points. The proposed method can help us identify the crucial points of each phoneme during speech. The results of this paper can contribute to the study of speech production and articulatory-based speech recognition.

Linguistic Ecology of North Mara “Languages”: A Comparative Study of Sound System Among the Selected “Languages”

Language sounds are sounds which construct meaningful phrases in languages. Although human beings produce many sounds of different types, human language uses only a certain number and types of sounds. Sounds of languages are of two types; either consonants or vowels due to articulatory system. The studied North Mara “languages” are Kurya, Simbiti, Kiroobha, Sweeta, Kabwa, Suba1, Kine and Kenye, There are two perspectives relating to North Mara “languages”: In one perspective, these languages are regarded as similar and related to each other while in the other perspective the languages are regarded as different. The article focuses on the comparison of sound system in North Mara “languages”. According to data obtained, there are several syntactical criteria discussed: these are compensatory lengthening, deletion and minimal pairs. The study was led by “Comparative and Historical Linguistics” theory in portraying the relationship of “languages” being studied. The study used group discussion method to obtain data that gives similarities and differences of investigated “languages”. The results obtained from the research prove that there is a great similarity among the investigated “languages” in the case of sound system. Hence, linguistically these “languages” are more like dialects that relates closely to each other and are not independent languages as are seen in sociolinguistics perspective.

Early Acquisition of Palato-Alveolar Consonants in Japanese: Phoneme Frequencies in Child-Directed Speech

Segmental development in infants is inevitably governed by universal constraints due to infants’ immature articulatory system, while auditory input builds up language-specific constraints. Since Jakobson (1968) first proposed the universal order of language acquisition, the universal tendency for children to acquire vowels, then nasals, glides (j, w) and labial consonants, followed by the consonants produced at the back of the oral cavity has been recognized. If the size of the tongue or the oral cavity is the only cause for children’s mispronunciation, the order of language acquisition should be the same across languages. However, cross-linguistic differences in the order of phoneme acquisition has been reported in various studies (Rice and Avey 1995, Ingram 1999, Stokes and Wong 2002, Zhu 2002, Beckman et al. 2003, Tsurutani 2004). If we presuppose that the individual differences in children’s physical development or traits are not linguistically significant, diverse patterns of development among languages of the world can be attributed to differences in the phonology of each language. Infants’ linguistic skills are shaped by auditory input from the ambient language (Vihman 1996). Their perception capacity to discriminate between speech sounds declines or is modified as they acquire the phonological system of the language (Wenker and Tees 1984). It is highly likely that the order of language acquisition is affected by language-specific factors in the input. Some studies (Pye et al. 1987, Vihman 1996, Beckman et al. 2003) have discussed the relevance of frequency of occurrence or phonological saliency to the order of phoneme acquisition. However, researchers have not reached a conclusive theoretical explanation. We may presume, then, that the investigation of sounds acquired in the earlier stage of language acquisition than the universal order would provide some clarification on this issue. Japanese palato-alveolar consonants have been chosen for this study since Japanese language is linguistically quite different from English and most other languages, and early acquisition in Japanese could present an instructive contrast to early acquisition of other languages. This study investigates the frequency of palato-alveolar consonants in child-directed speech and the phonetic environments where these consonants are used. Findings from this empirical study are then used to consider languagespecific factors that affect aspects of sound acquisition.

The motor learning approach and strategies in the treatment of children’s articulation disorders

The article presents a theoretical analysis of the concept based on a motor learning approach as well as the possibilities for the application of this approach in speech and language therapy in the treatment of children’s articulation disorders. Motor learning principles have been emphasised as essential elements in speech and language therapy. They explain the importance of speech and language therapy services which are flexible and focused on individual cases. &#x0D; An analysis of theoretical sources focuses on the strategies of speech and language therapy based on the motor learning approach. These therapies differ between non-speech or speech levels. The aims of the application of these strategies and their theoretical presumptions of efficacy reveals the need for changes in the practice of speech and language therapists. An analysis of theoretical sources reveals that speech-based strategies of therapy are more efficient in learning correct sound pronunciation and promoting the intelligible speech of children. The application of non-speech oral motor therapy is purposeful in teaching non-speech movements of the articulatory system. When coping with children’s articulation disorders, it is necessary to differentiate strategies of motor learning with regard to the origin and level of a particular disorder.

Methods for eliciting, annotating, and analyzing databases for child speech development

Methods from automatic speech recognition (ASR), such as segmentation and forced alignment, have facilitated the rapid annotation and analysis of very large adult speech databases and databases of caregiver–infant interaction, enabling advances in speech science that were unimaginable just a few decades ago. This paper centers on two main problems that must be addressed in order to have analogous resources for developing and exploiting databases of young children’s speech. The first problem is to understand and appreciate the differences between adult and child speech that cause ASR models developed for adult speech to fail when applied to child speech. These differences include the fact that children’s vocal tracts are smaller than those of adult males and also changing rapidly in size and shape over the course of development, leading to between-talker variability across age groups that dwarfs the between-talker differences between adult men and women. Moreover, children do not achieve fully adult-like speech motor control until they are young adults, and their vocabularies and phonological proficiency are developing as well, leading to considerably more within-talker variability as well as more between-talker variability. The second problem then is to determine what annotation schemas and analysis techniques can most usefully capture relevant aspects of this variability. Indeed, standard acoustic characterizations applied to child speech reveal that adult-centered annotation schemas fail to capture phenomena such as the emergence of covert contrasts in children’s developing phonological systems, while also revealing children’s nonuniform progression toward community speech norms as they acquire the phonological systems of their native languages. Both problems point to the need for more basic research into the growth and development of the articulatory system (as well as of the lexicon and phonological system) that is oriented explicitly toward the construction of age-appropriate computational models.

Automatic Vowel Sequence Reproduction for a Talking Robot Based on PARCOR Coefficient Template Matching

This paper describes an automatic vowel sequence reproduction system for a talking robot built to reproduce the human voice based on the working behavior of the human articulatory system. A sound analysis system is developed to record a sentence spoken by a human (mainly vowel sequences in the Japanese language) and to then analyze that sentence to give the correct command packet so the talking robot can repeat it. An algorithm based on a short-time energy method is developed to separate and count sound phonemes. A matching template using partial correlation coefficients (PARCOR) is applied to detect a voice in the talking robot's database similar to the spoken voice. Combining the sound separation and counting the result with the detection of vowels in human speech, the talking robot can reproduce a vowel sequence similar to the one spoken by the human. Two tests to verify the working behavior of the robot are performed. The results of the tests indicate that the robot can repeat a sequence of vowels spoken by a human with an average success rate of more than 60%.

Real-time articulatory biofeedback with electromagnetic articulography

Abstract This paper presents an articulatory biofeedback system and discusses new research methods made possible by this technology. The real-time electromagnetic articulography biofeedback system (RT-EMA) enables speakers to observe a visual representation of the movements of their speech articulators while they are speaking. Investigators can dynamically control the visual display of virtual targets or other objects in vocal tract space, track events involving interactions between virtual objects and articulators, and define custom actions in response to such events. Preliminary findings from experimental studies and games employing biofeedback are reported, with emphasis on the potential applications of articulatory biofeedback for investigating questions of linguistic interest.