On the relationship between palate shape and articulatory behavior

Jana Brunner (1, 2) , Susanne Fuchs (2) , Pascal Perrier (1)

1 GIPSA-AABC - GIPSA - Acoustique, Aéroacoustique, Biomécanique et Contrôle
2 ZAS - Zentrum für Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft [Berlin]

In this study the acoustic and articulatory variability of speakers with different palate shapes were compared. Since the cross-sectional area of the vocal tract changes less for a slight change in tongue position if the palate is domeshaped than if it is flat, the acoustic variability should be greater for flat palates than for domeshaped ones. Consequently, it can be hypothesized that speakers with flat palates should reduce their articulatory variability in order to keep the acoustic output constant. This hypothesis was tested on 32 speakers recorded via EPG and acoustics. The articulatory and acoustic variability of some of their vowels and /j/ was measured. Indeed, the results show that the speakers with flat palates reduce their variability in tongue height. There is no such trend in acoustic variability.

Keywords: Speech Production; Perturbed Speech; Compensation; Speech task; Interspeaker variability; Palate

Domains: Linguistics; Linguistics; Acoustics [physics.class-ph]; Acoustics [physics.class-ph]

Jana Brunner, Susanne Fuchs, Pascal Perrier. On the relationship between palate shape and articulatory behavior. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 2009, 125 (6), pp.3936-3949. ⟨10.1121/1.3125313⟩. ⟨hal-00391836⟩