Abstract

The tongue varies across speakers in terms of the proportion of the overall speech production apparatus that it occupies. Differences in tongue size have the potential to result in speaker-specific articulatory strategies for shaping the vocal tract area function and, in turn, individual patterns of vowel acoustics. The present study examines the interplay between relative tongue size and vowel production using real-time magnetic resonance imaging with synchronous audio. Two populations of native American English subjects are considered, one containing healthy adult speakers with no relevant pathologies, and another containing speakers who had undergone glossectomy as treatment for tongue cancer. All subjects were imaged in the midsagittal plane while reading phonetically balanced English sentences. The size of the tongue and the speech production apparatus were quantified from an overall average …

Date

2013

Authors

Adam Lammert, Christina Hagedorn, Michael Proctor, Louis Goldstein, Shrikanth Narayanan

Journal

The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America

Volume

134

Issue

5_Supplement

Pages

4205-4205

Publisher

Acoustical Society of America