Abstract:
Speakers change how they move their articulators when they change the rate at which they speak. Some speakers move different distances, and/or at different rates. Others change how multiple movements are coordinated in time. Still others appear to change the syllabic structure of utterances, and thus, the number and kinds of necessary movements. Up to now, most of what has been learned about speaking rate and movement has been derived from small speaker samples, and limited comparisons involving ``magic'' measures of short intervals from unnatural speech tasks. This new investigation seeks to describe and relate patterns of sagittal-plane movements of tongue, jaw, and lip fleshpoints accompanying an eight-word sentence, read 4--6 times, at three rates (nominally, double-speed, habitual, and half-speed), by 22 normal young adult speakers of American English. Summary statistics have been computed within and across speakers and fleshpoints, for distributions of fleshpoint positions and speeds, position-history spectra, and durations of selected subintervals. These data provide an improved estimate of the nature and variability of rate-modifying strategies, and useful working ideas about control objectives in speech, and the role of the articulator plant in determining the temporal and spatial character of speech. [Work supported by NIH Grant No. DC00820.]