Tongue Body Position Research Articles

The effect of orthodontic vertical control on the changes in the upper airway size and tongue and hyoid position in adult patients with hyperdivergent skeletal class II

BackgroundAt present, there are still controversies about the influence of orthodontic treatment on the size of upper airway and the position of hyoid bone. We investigated the effect of orthodontic vertical control therapy on the size of the upper airway and position of the tongue and hyoid bone in adult patients with hyperdivergent skeletal Class II.MethodsOverall, 15 adults with hyperdivergent skeletal Class II and normal occlusion, respectively, were selected as the experimental and control groups. The angle and line of the craniofacial structure, upper airway, hyoid bone position and three-dimensional (3D) upper airway indexes were measured using the Uceph 4.2.1 standard version and Mimics 21.0 software, respectively. The paired t-test, Wilcoxon symbol rank test, t-test of two independent samples, two independent sample nonparametric tests, Mann–Whitney U test, Pearson correlation analysis, the Univariate linear regression analysis and Multiple linear regression analysis were performed.ResultsAfter treatment, the S-Go/N-Me (%) and the MP-SN and XiPm-SN angles were significantly different (P < 0.01). The U-MPW and PAS significantly increased (P < 0.05), sagittal diameter L2 increased significantly, and transverse diameter L2 decreased significantly (P < 0.01). Although no significant correlation was observed between the vertical change in the jaw and that in U-MPW and PAS, the sagittal diameter L2 showed a significant correlation (P < 0.05). The Multiple linear regression analysis showed that there was a significant negative correlation between the variables MP-SN and sagittal diameter L2 and positive correlation between S-Go/N-Me(%) and H-MP (P < 0.05). Furthermore, significant differences between the Hv (P < 0.01) and sagittal diameter L1(P < 0.05) were observed before and after treatment.ConclusionsAfter the orthodontic vertical control therapy in patients with hyperdivergent skeletal Class II, the upper airway only underwent adaptive changes during treatment without substantial size changes, the position of tongue body and hyoid bone did not change significantly. Furthermore, compared with normal occlusion, the velopharyngeal segment airway of patients with hyperdivergent skeletal Class II remains narrow and long after treatment.

Characteristics of articulatory gestures in stuttered speech: A case study using real-time magnetic resonance imaging

IntroductionMost of the previous articulatory studies of stuttering have focussed on the fluent speech of people who stutter. However, to better understand what causes the actual moments of stuttering, it is necessary to probe articulatory behaviors during stuttered speech. We examined the supralaryngeal articulatory characteristics of stuttered speech using real-time structural magnetic resonance imaging (RT-MRI). We investigated how articulatory gestures differ across stuttered and fluent speech of the same speaker. MethodsVocal tract movements of an adult man who stutters during a pseudoword reading task were recorded using RT-MRI. Four regions of interest (ROIs) were defined on RT-MRI image sequences around the lips, tongue tip, tongue body, and velum. The variation of pixel intensity in each ROI over time provided an estimate of the movement of these four articulators. ResultsAll disfluencies occurred on syllable-initial consonants. Three articulatory patterns were identified. Pattern 1 showed smooth gestural formation and release like fluent speech. Patterns 2 and 3 showed delayed release of gestures due to articulator fixation or oscillation respectively. Block and prolongation corresponded to either pattern 1 or 2. Repetition corresponded to pattern 3 or a mix of patterns. Gestures for disfluent consonants typically exhibited a greater constriction than fluent gestures, which was rarely corrected during disfluencies. Gestures for the upcoming vowel were initiated and executed during these consonant disfluencies, achieving a tongue body position similar to the fluent counterpart. ConclusionDifferent perceptual types of disfluencies did not necessarily result from distinct articulatory patterns, highlighting the importance of collecting articulatory data of stuttering. Disfluencies on syllable-initial consonants were related to the delayed release and the overshoot of consonant gestures, rather than the delayed initiation of vowel gestures. This suggests that stuttering does not arise from problems with planning the vowel gestures, but rather with releasing the overly constricted consonant gestures.

Liquid polarity, positional contrast, and diachronic change

AbstractApparently disparate sound changes in Latin, involving both vowels and consonants but sensitive to /r/, can be explained by reconstructing a positional clear/dark contrast in /r/, motivated by the seldom-mentioned “liquid polarity” effect. Examining these diachronic processes together allows us to see a larger picture, providing evidence for the reconstruction of successive past synchronic states. Latin /r/ mirrored the behaviour of Latin /l/ up to the first century BC: /l/ was dark and /r/ was clear in codas, and /r/ was dark and /l/ was underspecified for tongue body position in onsets. Darkness in /r/ was partly implemented through the selection of r-type: dark onset approximant and clear coda tap. Later, coda /r/ became an approximant like onset /r/, and subsequently both became trills, resulting in the erosion of the positional contrast and the liquid polarity effect.

Lowered F2 observed in uvular rhotics involves a tongue root gesture: Evidence from Upper Sorbian.

Upper Sorbian, an endangered West Slavic language spoken in Germany, is unusual among Slavic languages in having a uvular rhotic /ʀ/. This paper focuses on the gestural configuration and coarticulatory resistance of the uvular rhotic and explores the relation between the articulation and acoustics of this sound. Ultrasound tongue imaging data were collected from six native speakers of Upper Sorbian, who produced /ʀ/ in word-initial, intervocalic, and word-final positions next to the vowels /e a o/. Smoothing Spline ANOVAs were used to compare tongue contours within and across phonetic contexts. Differences in the tongue root and tongue body position were also calculated across environments and compared using a measure of coarticulatory resistance. The results revealed that the sound was produced with considerable tongue root retraction and a uvular-pharyngeal tongue body constriction. The tongue root had a high resistance to coarticulatory effects, while the tongue body did not. The results suggest that the tongue root retraction into the pharyngeal cavity results in observed high F1 and low F2 effects associated with unpalatalized rhotic consonants and may explain perceptual similarity between uvular and alveolar rhotics. Articulatory constraints on the tongue root also account for phonotactic distribution of the rhotics across languages.

A comparison of acoustic and articulatory parameters for the GOOSE vowel across British Isles Englishes.

This study quantifies vocalic variation that cannot be measured from the acoustic signal alone and develops methods of standardisation and measurement of articulatory parameters for vowels. Articulatory-acoustic variation in the GOOSE vowel was measured across 3 regional accents of the British Isles using a total of 18 speakers from the Republic of Ireland, Scotland, and England, recorded with synchronous ultrasound tongue imaging, lip camera, and audio. Single co-temporal measures were taken of tongue-body height and backness, lip protrusion, F1, and F2. After normalisation, mixed-effects modelling identified statistically significant variations per region; tongue-body position was significantly higher and fronter for Irish and English speakers. Region was also significant for lip-protrusion measures with Scottish speakers showing significantly smaller degrees of protrusion than English speakers. However, the region was only significant for acoustic height and not for frontness. Correlational analyses of all measures showed a significant positive correlation between tongue-body height and acoustic height, a negative correlation between lip-protrusion and acoustic frontness, but no correlation between tongue-body frontness and acoustic frontness. Effectively, two distinct regional production strategies were found to result in similar normalised acoustic frontness measures for GOOSE. Scottish tongue-body positions were backer and lips less protruded, while English and Irish speakers had fronter tongue-body positions, but more protruded lips.

Modeling Dimensions of Prosodic Prominence

Detailed modifications both in the laryngeal as well as in the supra-laryngeal domain have been shown to be used by speakers of German to express prosodic prominence. This paper aims to bring the two domains together in a joint analysis and modelling account. We report results on the prosodic marking of focus types from 27 speakers that were recorded acoustically and with electromagnetic articulography. We investigate the intonational patterns (tonal onglide) as well as the articulatory movements during the vowel production (lip aperture and tongue body position). We provide further evidence for categorical and continuous modifications across and within accentuation and sketch a dynamical model that accounts for these modifications on multiple dimensions as the consequence of scaling the same parameter. In this model, the prosodic dimensions contribute differently to the complex shape of the compositional attractor landscape and respond differently to the scaling of the system. The study aims to add to our understanding of the integration of speech sounds in a two-fold manner: the integration of different channels of prosody (laryngeal and supra-laryngeal) as well as the interplay of categorical and continuous aspects of speech.

Crossmodal correspondence between haptic shape and sound

Accumulating evidence has demonstrated the existence of non-arbitrary correspondence between sensory modalities. For example, studies report non-arbitrary relationship between visual shape and sound: people tend to label a round shape 'bouba' and a spiky shape 'kiki' (Köhler, 1947; Ramachandran & Hubbard, 2001). Since such relationship is well established mostly in the visual and auditory domain, the present study aimed to examine the correspondence between the haptic and auditory modality, which has not been illuminated much in previous studies. A three-dimensional, round and a spiky haptic stimulus were generated with a parametric shape model (Lee Masson et al., 2016), and linear interpolation was carried out on the coordinates of the two stimuli to generate five more stimuli in between. As a result, there were total seven haptic stimuli, of which the roundness/spikiness dimension was equi-distantly manipulated. Multidimensional scaling analysis confirmed that physical spaces conformed to perceptual space, showing the effectiveness of the manipulation of the physical parameters. For the auditory stimuli, we used Haskins Articulatory Synthesizer to generate two vowel sounds by manipulating the height and frontness of the tongue body position (e.g. /a/, /i/). These sounds were shown to be associated with either round or spiky visual shape (Kwak et al., iMRF 2017). On each trial of the experiment, participants (N=19) had to palpate a haptic stimulus for 5 seconds, after which it was taken away by the experimenter. Then the two sounds were presented sequentially, and the participants had to choose the sound that better matched the object. Results showed the main effect of shape: the roundest object was associated with /a/, whereas the spikiest object was associated with /i/, and responses for the objects in between were modulated according to the roundness/spikiness dimension. These results suggest that the correspondence between shape and sound extends to haptics and audition. Meeting abstract presented at VSS 2018

An ultrasound study of Connemara Irish palatalization and velarization

We present the first ultrasound analysis of the secondary palatalization contrast in Irish, analyzing data from five speakers from the Connemara dialect group. Word-initial /pʲ(bʲ)pˠ(bˠ)tʲtˠkʲkˠfʲfˠsʲsˠxʲxˠ/ are analyzed in the context of /iːuː/. We find, first, that tongue body position robustly distinguishes palatalized from velarized consonants, across place of articulation, manner, and vowel place contexts, with palatalized consonants having fronter and/or higher tongue body realizations than their velarized counterparts. This conclusion holds equally for labial consonants, contrary to some previous descriptive claims. Second, the nature and degree of palatalization and velarization depend in systematic ways on consonant place and manner. In coronal consonants, for example, velarization is weaker or absent. Third, the Irish consonants examined resist coarticulation in backness with a following vowel. In all of these respects Irish palatalization is remarkably similar to that of Russian. Our results also support an independent role for pharyngeal cavity expansion/retraction in the production of the palatalization contrast. Finally, we discuss preliminary findings on the dynamics of the secondary articulation gestures. Our use of principal component analysis (PCA) in reaching these findings is also of interest, since PCA has not been employed a great deal in analyses of tongue body movement.

Articulatory mechanisms underlying onset-vowel organization

Previous research on articulatory correlates of syllable structure suggests that the temporal organization of syllables varies as a function of the segmental make-up of the onset cluster, yet there is currently little understanding of the details conditioning this variation. We pursue the hypothesis that consonantal coarticulation resistance is one such segment-based determinant of onset-vowel timing. In order to test this we recorded articulography data for Polish and systematically varied the coarticulation resistance of C2 in #C1C2V clusters. We examined singleton and cluster onsets with different vowel-adjacent consonants in terms of temporal lag measurements as done in previous studies as well as in terms of tongue body position measurements. Both analyses revealed parallel results and substantiate the hypothesized interaction of coarticulation resistance of the vowel-adjacent consonant and onset-vowel organization. We discuss how this interaction between articulator dominance and temporal overlap can be modeled within the gestural approach to syllable organization by giving a novel interpretation to the coupling strength parameter in terms of coarticulation resistance.

Lingual Articulation and Coarticulation for Catalan Consonants and Vowels: An Ultrasound Study

Background: The study investigates the tongue position and coarticulatory characteristics of a subset of Catalan consonants and vowels using ultrasound. Method: Ultrasound data were recorded and analyzed for the Catalan front lingual consonants /t, d, n, l, ɾ, s, r, ʎ, ɲ, ʃ/ and vowels /i, e, a, o, u/ in symmetrical VCV sequences produced by 5 adult Catalan speakers. Results: Among other aspects, data show more tongue body fronting for palatal consonants and, among dentals and alveolars, for laminals than for apicals; the manner of articulation demands account for considerable tongue body retraction and predorsum lowering during the trill /r/ and for some tongue body retraction during /l/ next to front vowels. Vowel and consonant coarticulation occurs mostly in lingual regions which are not primarily involved in closure or constriction formation. Differences in the relative prominence of the anticipatory and carryover consonant-to-vowel effects in tongue body position were found to hold clearly for /r/ in all vowel contexts and for palatal consonants next to /a, o, u/. Conclusions: Place-dependent and manner-dependent articulatory characteristics for consonants and vowels account for the most relevant coarticulatory effects and may contribute to explain several sound change patterns.

Acquisition of vowel articulation in childhood investigated by acoustic-to-articulatory inversion

While the acoustical features of speech sounds in children have been extensively studied, limited information is available as to their articulation during speech production. Instead of directly measuring articulatory movements, this study used an acoustic-to-articulatory inversion model with scalable vocal tract size to estimate developmental changes in articulatory state during vowel production. Using a pseudo-inverse Jacobian matrix of a model mapping seven articulatory parameters to acoustic ones, the formant frequencies of each vowel produced by three Japanese children over time at ages between 6 and 60 months were transformed into articulatory parameters. We conducted the discriminant analysis to reveal differences in articulatory states for production of each vowel. The analysis suggested that development of vowel production went through gradual functionalization of articulatory parameters. At 6–9 months, the coordination of position of tongue body and lip aperture forms three vowels: front, back, and central. At 10–17 months, recruitments of jaw and tongue apex enable differentiation of these three vowels into five. At 18 months and older, recruitment of tongue shape produces more distinct vowels specific to Japanese. These results suggest that the jaw and tongue apex contributed to speech production by young children regardless of kinds of vowel. Moreover, initial articulatory states for each vowel could be distinguished by the manner of coordination between lip and tongue, and these initial states are differentiated and refined into articulations adjusted to the native language over the course of development.

Influences of Tone on Vowel Articulation in Mandarin Chinese.

Models of speech production often abstract away from shared physiology in pitch control and lingual articulation, positing independent control of tone and vowel units. We assess the validity of this assumption in Mandarin Chinese by evaluating the stability of lingual articulation for vowels across variation in tone. Electromagnetic articulography was used to track flesh points on the tongue (tip, body, dorsum), lips, and jaw while native Mandarin speakers (n = 6) produced 3 vowels, /pa/, /pi/, /pu/, combined with 4 Mandarin tones: T1 "high," T2 "rising," T3 "low," and T4 "falling." Consistent with physiological expectations, tones that begin low, T2 and T3, conditioned a lower position of the tongue body for the vowel /a/. For the vowel /i/, we found the opposite effect, whereby tones that begin low, T2 and T3, conditioned a higher tongue body position. The physiology of pitch control exerts systematic variation on the lingual articulation of /a/ across tones. The effects of tone on /i/ articulation are in the opposite direction predicted by physiological considerations. Physiologically arbitrary variation of the type observed for /i/ challenges the assumption that phonetic patterns can be determined by independent control of tone (source) and vowel (filter) production units.

Tongue body shape during the production of Irish palatalization and velarization

Irish is an endangered Celtic (Goidelic) language that has a rare phonemic contrast between palatalized and velarized consonants for all places and manners of articulation. Using ultrasound tongue body imaging of 15 native speakers we provide comparative data on the phonetic realization of the contrast, specifically focusing on how place, manner, and vowel context each affect tongue body position during production for each of the three major dialects. Using principal components analysis, we find evidence for the role of tongue root advancement in the contrast independent of the (less surprising) roles of tongue body frontness and raising. This data have consequences for our understanding of the relationship between phonetic and phonological categories as well as the role of perceptual saliency in shaping inventories.

Investigation of the role of the tongue root in Kazakh vowel production using ultrasound

It has been argued that Kazakh primarily distinguishes its anterior ("front") vowels from its posterior ("back") vowels through retraction of the tongue root. This analysis is at odds with the traditional assumption that the anteriority of Kazakh vowels is contrasted by tongue body position. The present study uses ultrasound imaging to investigate the extent to which the position of the tongue root and the tongue body are involved in the anteriority contrast in Kazakh. Native speakers of Kazakh were recorded reading words (in carrier sentences) containing target vowels, which were controlled for adjacent consonants and metrical position. An audio recording was also made of these sessions. Frames containing productions of the target vowels were extracted from the ultrasound video and the imaged surface of the tongue was manually traced. Analyses of tongue root and body position were analyzed for each vowel and will be presented together with formant measurements from the audio recordings.

Recovery of articulatory information from acoustics using linear mixed effects models

The current study attempts to establish a lower bound on the degree to which articulatory information can be recovered from the speech signal. The recovery of articulatory information is modeled with comparatively simple linear mixed-effects models using synchronized articulatory and acoustic data from the University of Wisconsin X-Ray Microbeam Speech Production Database (Westbury, 1994). The performance of this model is compared with other speech inversion models. While previous work [Mitra etal. (2010) and others] demonstrates that a more sophisticated model can perform speech inversion quite accurately, the results here show that even a strongly constrained linear model performs better than might be expected given that the well-known non-linearity of the acoustic-articulatory mapping. More detailed investigation of the results indicates that while non-linearity in the acoustic-articulatory mapping affects the recovery of articulatory information for all tongue regions, it contributes considerably more to error in recovering tongue-tip position. For the tongue body, the correlation between predicted and observed tongue body position is approximately 0.9 while the correlation for tongue tip position was approximately 0.65. A linear approximation seems to be sufficient to recover tongue body position with average error of approximately 12%, even with limited acoustic information.

Coarticulation effects of Korean sibilant /s/ before a high front segment

This paper investigates acoustic characteristics of Korean /s/ before a high front segment and argues that Korean /s/ shows acoustic characteristics of a palatalized segment due to the coarticulation with the following high front segments. In Experiment, it is shown that the first 30 msec of /s/ before /i, ye, ya/ shows spectral peaks around 4 kHz whereas /s/ before open vowels like /e, a/ shows peaks around 6 kHz. We suggest that this is due to the tongue body position at the palatal area placed at the beginning of /s/ when it is followed by /i/ or /y/. Center of gravity frequency, and band energy difference also show differences of Korean /s/ in different contexts. Based on the results of this experiment, we argue that Korean /s/ is modified from its beginning due to the coarticulation with the following segments if articulators of /s/ are compatible with those of the following segments. Interestingly, this paper also shows that in case /s/ is followed by /yu/ or /yo/, its spectral shape shows significant differences from /s/ followed by /ya/ or /ye/. It raises the question that in Korean the domain of coarituclation may be larger than the target and its immediately surrounding segment.

Producing American English Vowels During Vocal Tract Growth: A Perceptual Categorization Study of Synthesized Vowels

To consider interactions of vocal tract change with growth and perceived output patterns across development, the influence of nonuniform vocal tract growth on the ability to reach acoustic-perceptual targets for English vowels was studied. Thirty-seven American English speakers participated in a perceptual categorization experiment. For the experiment, an articulatory-to-acoustic model was used to synthesize 342 five-formant vowels, covering maximal vowel spaces for speakers at 5 growth stages (from 6 months old to adult). Results indicate that the 3 vowels /i u ae/ can be correctly perceived by adult listeners when produced by speakers with a 6-month-old vocal tract. Articulatory-to-acoustic relationships for these 3 vowels differ across growth stages. For a given perceived vowel category, the infant's tongue position is more fronted than the adult's. Furthermore, nonuniform vocal tract growth influences degree of interarticulator coupling for a given perceived vowel, leading to a reduced correlation between jaw height and tongue body position in infantlike compared with adult vocal tracts. Findings suggest that nonuniform vocal tract growth does not prevent the speaker from producing acoustic-auditory targets related to American English vowels. However, the relationships between articulatory configurations and perceptual targets change from birth to adulthood.

Acoustic and ultrasound investigation of English vowel-to-vowel coarticulation.

This study examined the hypothesis of whether vowel‐to‐vowel coarticulation effects are stronger when a particular vowel segment is under focus in clarified speech than when it is not under a condition of focus. In one condition, native speakers of American English produced disyllabic word pairs that varied in the quality of their first vowel (stressed V1), while in the second condition, the same group of speakers produced the word pairs that varied in the quality of their second vowel (V2). The degree of coarticulation was determined by the amount of spectral and/or articulatory displacement that occurred during the production of V2‐position [schwa] due to the influence of V1. Due to the need to increase the likelihood of coarticulatory effects during speakers’ productions, recording trials were sped up to a conversational speaking rate. Spectral measurements (first and second formants) of ə in both conditions were taken, as well as tongue‐surface position measurements pertaining to the position of tongue body during the production of ə under the two conditions. Preliminary acoustic analysis indicates that speakers produced V2‐position ə with greater coarticulatory effects in the V1‐clarifying condition than in the V2‐clarifying condition.

Stroboscopic-Cine MRI Data on Korean Coronal Plosives and Affricates: Implications for Their Place of Articulation as Alveolar

The present study aimed to explore the place of articulation of the Korean (pulmonic egressive) lenis, aspirated and fortis affricates /c, c^h, c’/ in comparison with that of the coronal plosive counterparts /t, t^h, t’/. For this purpose, a stroboscopiccine magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) experiment was conducted to examine not only where oral contact and constriction occur during oral closure and at its release, but also which part of the tongue is involved and how the apex, the blade and the body of the tongue are positioned as a function of time. Based on the results of the MRI experiment, we propose that the affricates should be classified as alveolar like the plosives but that they could be different in tongue shapes during oral closure and at its release: the affricates are laminal and the plosives are apical or apico-laminal. This distinction is associated with correlated variations in tongue body position (measured as pharyngeal width) and tongue blade position: tongue body position is more fronted with a relatively higher tongue blade position in affricates than in plosives. It is proposed that the gestural differences between the two types of stops serve to enhance the auditory contrast between the [+strident] affricates and the [–strident] plosives.

Greek fricatives: Inferring articulation from F2 at vowel onset

Fricative consonants are produced with a narrow constriction in the vocal tract. According to the acoustic theory of speech production (Fant, 1960), fricatives are characterized by spectral prominences corresponding to the natural frequencies of the cavity anterior to the constriction. The spectral characteristics may also be modified by acoustic coupling of the noise source to the cavity behind the constriction (Stevens, 1998). In addition to the defining acoustic attributes, other articulatory gestures may be added to enhance the perceptual saliency of the fricatives (Stevens, 1989). This study examines the second formant frequency (F2) at the onset of a vowel following a fricative as an indication of tongue body position, a potential enhancing gesture for fricatives. F2 measurements were obtained from a database of 1950 tokens including all ten Greek fricatives (five places of articulation, two voicing categories) produced in five vowel contexts by 25 speakers. The results indicate highest F2 for palatals, followed by alveolars, dentals, labiodentals, and velars. Despite some variability by vowel context, the F2 values are reliably distinct among the five places of articulation. These findings are discussed in terms of the acoustic theory and the enhancement account.