Articulatory Targets and Speech Motor Control: A Study of Vowel Production

Perkell, Joseph S.; Nelson, W. L.

doi:10.1016/b978-0-08-028892-5.50020-7

Cited by 27 publications

(19 citation statements)

References 14 publications

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“…Conversely, little inward or medial movement of the pharyngeal walls has been observed during the production of high vowels such as/u/or/i/. These patterns have also been observed in lateral view x-ray studies (Kent and Moll, 1969;Perkell, 1969;Perkell and Nelson, 1982;Wood, 1979).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 78%

Lower pharyngeal wall coarticulation in VCV syllables

Parush

Ostry

1993

The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America

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Speech movements of the lower pharyngeal wall were recorded in two subjects using pulsed-echo ultrasound. The focus of the study was the pattern of coarticulation of pharyngeal wall movements. Using nonsense utterances as test material, both anticipatory and carryover coarticulatory effects were observed. The identity of the final vowel in VCV sequences affected the kinematic characteristics of the initial VC transition. Both the amplitude and the duration of the movement between the initial vowel and the consonant were greater when the final vowel was /u/ rather than /a/. Similarly, the initial vowel affected the kinematic characteristics of the final CV transition. The amplitude of the movement from the consonant to the final vowel was greater with the initial vowel /u/ as opposed to /a/. The coarticulatory patterns observed in this study are similar to those previously reported for the tongue dorsum and upper pharynx [Parush et al., J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 74, 1115-1125 (1983); Parush and Ostry, J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 80, 749-756 (1986)].

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 78%

Lower pharyngeal wall coarticulation in VCV syllables

Parush

Ostry

1993

The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America

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“…is similar in that it is also based {in part} on articulatory modeling, and it also invokes a "saturation" principle. {For details, see Perkell and Nelson, 1982.} We speculate that to produce an/a?, the tongue body is pulled downward and "squeezed" backward by the action of the hyoglossus muscle.…”

Section: A Articulatory Datamentioning

confidence: 98%

Variability in production of the vowels /i/ and /a/

Perkell

Nelson

1985

The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America

113

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A hypothesis on the nature of articulatory targets for the vowels /i/ and /a/ is proposed, based on acoustic considerations and vowel articulations. The conjecture is that positioning of points on the tongue surface in a repetition experiment should be most accurate in the direction perpendicular to the vocal-tract midline, at the acoustically critical point of maximal constriction for each vowel. The hypothesis was tested by: examining x-ray microbeam data for three speakers, conducting a partial acoustical analysis, and performing a modeling study. Distributions were plotted of the midsagittal locations of three tongue points at the time of maximal excursion toward the vowel target for numbers of examples of the vowels, embedded in a variety of phonetic contexts. More variation was found along a direction parallel to the vocal tract midline than perpendicular to the midline, supporting the hypothesis. Statistics on formant values for one subject have been calculated, and pairwise regressions of displacement and formant data have been run. An articulatory synthesizer [Rubin et al., J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 70, 321-328 (1981)] has been manipulated through displacements similar to the subject's articulatory variation. Although articulatory synthesis showed systematic relationships between articulatory relationships and formant frequencies, there were no significant correlations between the subject's measured articulatory displacements and his formant data. These additional results raise questions about the methodology and point to the need for additional work for an adequate test of the hypothesis.

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“…The hypothesis of more articulatory variability along acoustically less important dimensions for the vowels /i/ and /a/ was tested on human subjects in studies by Nelson (1982, 1985). These reports showed more variability in tongue position along a direction parallel to the vocal tract midline than for the acousti- human subject in the study of Perkell and Nelson (1982; is shown in the top part of A final example of variability of place of articulation in DIVA comes from the observation that in some cases one should see very wide, but not complete, variation along an orosensory dimension that is largely, but not completely, irrelevant for a particular speech sound.…”

Section: Variability In Place Of Articulationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Speech sound acquisition, coarticulation, and rate effects in a neural network model of speech production.

Guenther

1995

Psychological Review

379

351

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This article describes a neural network model of speech motor skill acquisition and speech production that explains a wide range of data on variability, motor equivalence, coarticulation, and rate effects. Model parameters are learned during a babbling phase. To explain how infants learn language-specific variability limits, speech sound targets take the form of convex regions, rather than points, in orosensory coordinates. Reducing target size for better accuracy during slower speech leads to differential effects for vowels and consonants, as seen in experiments previously used as evidence for separate control processes for the 2 sound types. Anticipatory coarticulation arises when targets are reduced in size on the basis of context; this generalizes the well-known look-ahead model of coarticulation. Computer simulations verify the model's properties.The primary goal of the modeling work described in this article is to provide a coherent theoretical framework that provides explanations for a wide range of data concerning the articulator movements used by humans to produce speech sounds. This is carried out by formulating a model that transforms strings of phonemes into continuous articulator movements for producing these phonemes. This study of speech production is largely motivated by the following question of speech acquisition: How does an infant acquire the motor skills needed to produce the speech sounds of his or her native language? Speech production involves complex interactions among several different reference frames. A phonetic frame describes the sounds a speaker wishes to produce, and the signals that convey these sound units to a listener exist within an acoustic frame. Tactile and proprioceptive signals form an orosensory frame (e.g., Perkell, 1980) that describes the shape of the vocal tract, and the muscles controlling the positions of individual articulators make up an articulatory frame. The parameters governing the interactions among these frames cannot be fixed at birth. One reason for this is the language specificity of these interactions. For example, English listeners distinguish between the sounds /r/ and /!/, but Japanese listeners do not. Corresponding differences are seen in the articulator movements of the two groups (Miyawaki et al., 1975). Thus, despite some obvious commonalities between the phonetics of different languages (e.g., widespread use of consonants like /d/, /n/, and /s/ across the world's languages), the precise nature of mappings between acoustic goals and articulator movements depends on the lanThis research was supported in part by Air Force Office of Scientific Research F49620-92-J-0499. I would like to thank Dan Bullock and Elliot Saltzman for their insightful suggestions on an earlier

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Articulatory Targets and Speech Motor Control: A Study of Vowel Production

Cited by 27 publications

References 14 publications

Lower pharyngeal wall coarticulation in VCV syllables

Lower pharyngeal wall coarticulation in VCV syllables

Variability in production of the vowels /i/ and /a/

Speech sound acquisition, coarticulation, and rate effects in a neural network model of speech production.

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