A number of studies carried out on different languages have found that tongue movements in speech are made along two primary degrees of freedom (d.f.s): the high-front to low-back axis and the high-back to low-front axis. We explore the hypothesis that these two main d.f.s could find their origins in the physical properties of the vocal tract. A large set of tongue shapes was generated with a biomechanical tongue model using a Monte-Carlo method to thoroughly sample the muscle control space. The resulting shapes were analyzed with PCA. The first two factors explain 84% of the variance, and they are similar to the two experimentally observed d.f.s. This finding suggests that the d.f.s. are not speech-specific, and that speech takes advantage of biomechanically based tongue properties to form different sounds.
Cite as: Perrier, P., Perkell, J., Payan, Y., Zandipour, M., Guenther, F., Khalighi, A. (2000) Degrees of freedom of tongue movements in speech may be constrained by biomechanics. Proc. 6th International Conference on Spoken Language Processing (ICSLP 2000), vol. 2, 162-165, doi: 10.21437/ICSLP.2000-234
@inproceedings{perrier00_icslp,
author={Pascal Perrier and Joseph Perkell and Yohan Payan and Majid Zandipour and Frank Guenther and Ali Khalighi},
title={{Degrees of freedom of tongue movements in speech may be constrained by biomechanics}},
year=2000,
booktitle={Proc. 6th International Conference on Spoken Language Processing (ICSLP 2000)},
pages={vol. 2, 162-165},
doi={10.21437/ICSLP.2000-234}
}