A STUDY OF TONGUE BODY MOTION DURING SELECTED SPEECH SOUNDS.

Abstract

The purpose of the study was to observe the behavior of the tongue body during speech production and to relate this behavior to the phonemic representation of speech. The technique used to observe the articulatory behavior was cineradiography. Specific points on the articulatory surfaces were identified by the attachment of six small radiopaque markers. The motion of these markers was observed during the production of nonsense tri-syllables constructed from the phonemes /i/, /a/, /u/, /b/, /g/ in the form VCVCV with various conditions of stress, as produced by a single speaker. Target positions were identified for each tongue point marker corresponding to each phoneme. The motion of the tongue points were analyzed in terms of (1) phoneme target-directed components and (2) non-target-directed components. A model of tongue body articulation was specified from the results. The tongue body motions predicted by this model were compared to observed data. The principal result of the study is the finding that parametrization of the tongue body in terms of surface points and analysis in terms of phoneme targets provides a relatively simple scheme for the representation of articulatory motion of the tongue body. (Author)

Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Aug 26, 1968
Accession Number
AD0682966

Entities

People

  • Robert A. Houde

Tags

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Attachment
  • Joining
  • Production
  • Syllables

Readers

  • Marine Hydrodynamics
  • Speech Processing/Speech Recognition.