Palate shape influence depends on the segment: Articulatory and acoustic variability in American English /ɹ/ and /s/

Morphological and acoustic modeling of the vocal tract

In speech production, the anatomical morphology forms the substrate on which the speakers build their articulatory strategy to reach specific articulatory-acoustic goals. The aim of this study is to characterize morphological inter-speaker variability by building a shape model of the full vocal tract including hard and soft structures. Static magnetic resonance imaging data from 41 speakers articulating altogether 1947 phonemes were considered, and the midsagittal articulator contours were manually outlined. A phoneme-independent average-articulation representative of morphology was calculated as the speaker mean articulation. A principal component analysis-driven shape model was derived from average-articulations, leading to five morphological components, which explained 87% of the variance. Almost three-quarters of the variance was related to independent variations of the horizontal oral and vertical pharyngeal lengths, the latter capturing male-female differences. The three additional components captured shape variations related to head tilt and palate shape. Plane wave propagation acoustic simulations were run to characterize morphological components. A lengthening of 1 cm of the vocal tract in the vertical or horizontal directions led to a decrease in formant values of 7%-8%. Further analyses are required to analyze three-dimensional variability and to understand the morphological-acoustic relationships per phoneme. Average-articulations and model code are publicly available (https://github.com/tonioser/VTMorphologicalModel).

Speech sounds in larger inventories are not (necessarily) less variable

This paper reconsiders a classic claim about phonetic variability-that speech sounds in larger phonemic inventories should exhibit less within-category variability in production. Although this hypothesis is intuitive, existing literature provides limited unqualified support for the claim, further complicated by the fact that null results (like those failing to find a difference in variability between languages) often go unpublished. Even so, existing work suggests that factors contributing to extent of variability are multifaceted. While phonological contrast may affect variability patterns, inventory size alone is not a reliable predictor of variability differences. This paper reviews relevant findings in the literature, presents an additional case study, and argues for more nuanced alternatives to account for cross-linguistic differences in extent of phonetic variability.