Quantification of tongue shape is potentially useful for indexing articulatory strategies arising from intervention, therapy and development. Tongue shape complexity is a parameter that can be used to reflect regional functional independence of the tongue musculature. This paper considers three different shape quantification methods – based on Procrustes analysis, curvature inflections, and Fourier coefficients – and uses a linear discriminant analysis to test how well each method is able to classify tongue shapes from different phonemes. Test data are taken from six native speakers of American English producing 15 phoneme types. Results classify tongue shapes accurately when combined across quantification methods. These methods hold promise for extending the use of ultrasound in clinical assessments of speech deficits.

Optical marker tracking integrated with electromagnetic articulometry was used to assess the movement extent of various points on (a) forehead skin and (b) points on a head-mounted apparatus, relative to a fixed point just above the upper incisors, and to compare the accuracy of the two different approaches to indexing head position during speech production. Both methods can provide a satisfactory index of head position. If skin-affixed markers are used, a minimum of 4 is recommended. Locations for optimal marker placement are identified.

To explore the previously reported effect of aging on lip-reading ability, older (60-75 years) and younger (18-35) adults gave oral responses to sentences from a modified version of the build-a-sentence (BAS) test [Tye-Murray et al., Int. J. Acoust., 47(S2), S31-S37, (2008)]. These sentences have predictable syntactic form but contain some words selected from a randomized list of nouns, e.g., ‘The duck watched the cop’. Participants identified these nouns from videos of a single female talker, and responses were transcribed by the experimenter. The 30 participants (15 native English speakers in each age group) were also tested for general cognitive function, vision, hearing, working memory (WM), attention, inhibition, and speech motor ability. They were also asked to gauge their own lip-reading abilities. Preliminary results indicate that the cognitive variables have effects independent of age. Sentence length and syntactic complexity contributed differently in the two age groups, perhaps due to WM capacity.