On simultaneous electromagnetic articulography and electroglottography data acquisition

Whereas electromagnetic articulography (EMA) studies commonly use a midsagittal sensor array to record articulatory patterns, higher spatial imaging data (e.g., MRI, ultrasound) suggest that some sounds, such as /ɹ/ and /I/, involve tongue concave/convex shape differences that are more effectively measured along a coronal axis. We therefore explored the use of a lateral sensor in the EMA measurement of liquid consonants. Ten adult subjects produced /I/ and /ɹ/ in /ɑCɑ/, /iCi/, and /uCu/ syllables while seated in a 3D electromagnetic articulography system (AG501, Carstens Medezinelektronic, GmbH). Speech movement was tracked for tongue sensors (tongue tip, TT, tongue lateral, TL, and tongue body, TB) and lips (upper lip, UL, and lower lip, LL). Preliminary results suggest that the TL sensor, taken together with TT and TB, provide an improved characterization of American English liquid consonants. Further results will be discussed in the context of developing methods to optimize real-time speech training and speech rehabilitation systems.

The tongue plays an important role in mastication, swallowing, and articulation, but it cannot be directly observed because of its location inside the oral cavity. This study aimed to clarify detailed 3D tongue movements during chewing using electromagnetic articulography (EMA). The participants were 10 healthy, young volunteers (average age 26.8 ± 2.1years; 5 males, 5 females). Tongue and jaw movement during gum chewing was measured and recorded using EMA. Four EMA sensors were attached to the anterior, posterior, left, and right surfaces of the tongue, and one sensor was also attached to the mandibular left incisor. The tongue motion during the chewing cycle was spatially and sequentially analyzed based on the motion trajectories of the tongue and mandible. The tongue moved downward and to the masticatory side in a manner similar to the movement of the jaw. The anterior tongue marker moved downward to a greater extent than the other tongue markers. However, the tongue moved forward as the jaw moved backward. The anterior marker reached the most anterior position during the jaw-opening phase and the posterior markers reached the most anterior position during the jaw-closing phase. Just before maximum jaw-opening, all markers on the tongue reached the bottom lowest position. During the jaw-closing phase, the tongue reached the dominant farthest position in the masticatory side. All the markers reached the most posterior position during the occlusal phase. These findings demonstrate the sequence of tongue motion patterns during gum chewing.

Electromagnetic Articulography (EMA) is a precise method for speech articulators assessment which is carried out by sensors placed mainly on the tongue. Various methods are being developed in order to avoid the assessment by EMA sensors. One of them is speech inversion. Here preliminary research on speech inversion based on dynamic time warping (DTW) method has been described. Mel-frequency cepstral coefficients (MFCC) method has been chosen as the acoustic speech signal parametrization method. Root mean square errors (RMSE) of the evaluation have been presented and discussed.

Examination of the grooving patterns of the Czech trill-fricative

We propose a speech-driven 3D tongue animation system. Firstly, the input speech is analyzed to obtain the phoneme sequence. Next, articulatory movements are predicted from the phoneme sequence using a hidden Markov model (HMM) based framework. The HMMs are trained beforehand using a corpus of human articulatory movements, which are recorded by three electromagnetic articulograph (EMA) sensors glued on the tongue tip, tongue body, and tongue dorsum of a speaker respectively. Finally, the predicted articulatory movements are used to control the deformations of a 3D tongue model. The tongue model is a triangular mesh with three key vertices. The three vertices are chosen so that their positions are in correspondence with the three EMA sensors mentioned above. Our tongue model can achieve various tongue shapes with volume preservation. Experiments show that the generated tongue animations are realistic and synchronize well with the input speech.

The purpose of this study was to assess differences between individuals treated for oral squamous cell carcinoma (ITOC) and control speakers on acoustic, kinematic, and perceptual measures of speech. Furthermore, this study aimed to assess the interrelatedness of these speech domains alongside self-reported speech outcomes in order to inform clinically relevant measures of speech in ITOC. Simultaneous acoustic and kinematic data (via electromagnetic articulography sensors on the tongue) were collected from nine ITOC, who received surgical treatment for a tumor located on either the tongue or jaw and eight age- and sex-matched control speakers. All participants were native speakers of Dutch and read the North Wind and the Sun Passage. We calculated the articulatory-acoustic vowel space (AAVS) from the acoustic data and the articulatory-kinematic vowel space (AKVS) from the tongue tip and tongue back sensor data. Inexperienced listeners (n = 35) provided intelligibility and listening effort ratings using a visual analogue scale rating procedure. Self-reported speech problems were assessed using the Speech Handicap Index. Compared to an age- and sex-matched control group, ITOC demonstrated a significantly smaller AAVS and AKVS of the tongue tip and back, as well as lower intelligibility ratings. A correlation analysis of all speech outcome measures within the ITOC group showed that group-wise, the acoustic, perceptual, and self-reported measures were most strongly associated with each other. While acoustic and kinematic measures were not strongly associated with each other on the group level, within-speaker correlations showed stronger acoustic-kinematic associations. This study demonstrates that acoustic, perceptual, and self-reported measures are related and quantify speech problem severity between ITOC, while kinematic measures showed no between-speaker relationships in a systematic way. Acoustic and kinematic measures showed greater within-speaker than between-speaker associations, reflecting speaker-specific compensatory behaviors. Our results underscore the importance of assessing the speech outcomes of ITOC across the acoustic, kinematic, perceptual, and self-reported domains to inform rehabilitation strategies. https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.29231144.

Speakers of languages having a relatively small vowel inventory (e.g., Japanese) may experience interference effects when attempting to produce novel vowels from a language with a larger vowel inventory, such as English. Studies of English vowels produced by native Japanese speakers have shown formant frequency and duration differences between native and accented productions. Less is known about the exact articulatory processes underlying second language vowel learning. The current study examines tongue position during native Japanese speakers’ productions of American English vowels. Ten speakers produced the front vowels /i/, /ɪ/, /e/, /ε/, and /æ/ while seated in a 3D electromagnetic articulograph (EMA) system that tracked the position of the tongue (tongue tip, TT, tongue dorsum, TD, and tongue back, TB) and lower lip during vowel productions in the consonant environment /hVd/. Kinematic and acoustic measures were taken at the midpoint of each vowel steady-state portion. Differences in tongue position for tense-lax vowel pairs were determined by calculating the Euclidean distance between vowel centroids. Preliminary results suggest more spatial overlap in vowels produced by Japanese talkers than those produced by monolingual English speakers. The relationship between these articulatory distances and acoustic measures (formant frequency and durational changes) will be explored.

This paper presents the results of open quotient (OQ) measurements in electroglottographic (EGG) signals of young (18–30 years) and elderly (60–82 years) male and female speakers. The paper further presents quantitative results of the relation between the EGG OQ and the perception of a speaker's age.Higgins and Saxman found a decreased EGG OQ with increased age for females, while the EGG OQ increased for males as the speaker's age increased in sustained vowel material . Although laryngeal degeneration due to increased age seems to occur to a lesser extent in females, the significant decrease of the OQ in elderly female voices could not be explained in terms of age-related physiological changes. Linville found increased spectral amplitudes in the region of F0 for the elderly (obtained by long-term average spectra (LTAS) measurements of read speech material), independent of gender, which could be indirectly interpreted as an increasing OQ . We measured the EGG OQ, not only for sustained vowels but also in vowels taken from isolated words and read speech material. To analyse the relation between breathiness in terms of an increased EGG OQ and the mean perceived age per stimulus, a perception test was carried out, in which listeners were asked to estimate speaker's age based on sustained /a/-vowels varying in vocal effort (soft–normal–loud) during production. 1) The decreased EGG OQ for elderly females originally found by Higgins and Saxman is not apparent in our data for sustained /a/-vowels; for males, however, we also found an increased EGG OQ for the elderly speakers. 2) In addition, an increased EGG OQ for the group of elderly in comparison to the younger males occurs for the unstressed syllable of the word material. 3) Our results show a strong positive relation between perceived age and EGG OQ in male vowel stimuli. Regarding 2), depending on the speech task at least a male speaker's voice gets more breathy as age increases. Considering 3), increased breathiness may contribute to the listener's perception of increased age.

BackgroundAlteration of speech loudness is an important component of the treatment of dysarthria aimed at improving speech intelligibility and/or naturalness of speech.ObjectiveTo determine the effects of manipulations of speech loudness (habitual vs. loud) on lingual kinematics and tongue-to-palate contacts in adult speakers with severe traumatic brain injury (TBI) and matched normal controls.Materials and methodsSix adults with severe TBI and five matched non-neurologically impaired controls underwent testing of their articulatory function using electromagnetic articulography and electropalatography (EPG).ResultsLoudness-related scaling of articulatory movements was observed in both the control and TBI groups for speech tasks that demonstrated a significant magnitude of loudness change in the absence of any reduction in speech rate. The TBI group demonstrated these effects during sentence production and during repetition of velar syllables. In contrast, the control group only exhibited an upscaling of articulatory movements for loud speech during repetition of alveolar syllables. Although the TBI group was significantly louder for all tasks than the control group, they also exhibited a significant decrease in overall speech rate compared to controls during sentence production at the loud level. Articulatory kinematics during loud speech production was comparable between the two groups. EPG results indicated no significant difference between the control and TBI groups for the loud condition on the temporal aspects of tongue-to-palate contact. The TBI group did show a significantly greater number of EPG contacts than controls during repetition of velar syllables.ConclusionsAlthough the TBI group differed to controls in loudness level and overall speech rate, their articulatory kinematics during loud speech were comparable. It is possible that upscaling of articulatory movements associated with increased loudness may have been offset by the downscaling of articulatory movements associated with reduced rate of speech.

While many studies focus on segmental variation in Parkinsonian speech, little is known about prosodic modulations reflecting the ability to adapt to communicative demands in people with Parkinson's disease (PwPD). This type of prosodic modulation is important for social interaction, and it involves modifications in speech melody (intonational level) and articulation of consonants and vowels (segmental level). The present study investigates phonetic cues of prosodic modulations with respect to different focus structures in mild dysarthric PwPD as a function of levodopa. Acoustic and kinematic speech parameters of 25 PwPD were assessed in two motor conditions. Speech production data from PwPD were collected before (medication-OFF) and after levodopa intake (medication-ON) by means of 3-D electromagnetic articulography. On the acoustic level, intensity, pitch, and syllable durations were analyzed. On the kinematic level, movement duration and amplitude were investigated. Spatio-temporal modulations of speech parameters were examined and compared across three different prosodic focus structures (out-of-focus, broad focus, contrastive focus) to display varying speech demands. Overall, levodopa had beneficial effects on motor performance, speech loudness, and pitch modulation. Acoustic syllable durations and kinematic movement durations did not change, revealing no systematic effects of motor status on the temporal domain. In contrast, there were spatial modulations of the oral articulators: tongue tip movements were smaller and lower lip movements were larger in amplitude under levodopa, reflecting a more agile and efficient articulatory movement under levodopa. Thus, respiratory-phonatory functions and consonant production improved, while syllable duration and tongue body kinematics did not change. Interestingly, prominence marking strategies were comparable between the medication conditions under investigation, and in fact, appear to be preserved in mild dysarthric PwPD.

The study investigates whether auditory information affects the nature of intrusion and reduction errors in reiterated speech. These errors are hypothesized to arise as a consequence of autonomous mechanisms to stabilize movement coordination. The specific question addressed is whether this process is affected by auditory information so that it will influence the occurrence of intrusions and reductions. Fifteen speakers produced word pairs with alternating onset consonants and identical rhymes repetitively at a normal and fast speaking rate, in masked and unmasked speech. Movement ranges of the tongue tip, tongue dorsum, and lower lip during onset consonants were retrieved from kinematic data collected with electromagnetic articulography. Reductions and intrusions were defined as statistical outliers from movement range distributions of target and nontarget articulators, respectively. Regardless of masking condition, the number of intrusions and reductions increased during the course of a trial, suggesting movement stabilization. However, compared with unmasked speech, speakers made fewer intrusions in masked speech. The number of reductions was not significantly affected. Masking of auditory information resulted in fewer intrusions, suggesting that speakers were able to pay closer attention to their articulatory movements. This highlights a possible stabilizing role for proprioceptive information in speech movement coordination.

The consistency and composition of functional synergies for speech movements were investigated in 7 year-old children and adults in a reiterated speech task using electromagnetic articulography (EMA). Results showed higher variability in children for tongue tip and jaw, but not for lower lip movement trajectories. Furthermore, the relative contribution to the oral closure of lower lip was smaller in children compared to adults, whereas in this respect no difference was found for tongue tip. These results support and extend findings of non-linearity in speech motor development and illustrate the importance of a multi-measures approach in studying speech motor development.

Vocal fold contact behavior was examined in separate groups of boys and girls through application of an electroglottograph(EGG). In general, a contact quotient (EGG duty cycle) showed minimal differences within and between boys and girls during sustained production of the vowels /i/, /u/, and /a/. The findings are discussed with respect to the laryngeal behavior of prepubescent children as well as the clinical utility and applicability of the EGG for examining phonatory behavior among young children.

This study was designed to examine comfort levels of pitch and loudness with target matching and their effects on electroglottographic (EGG) and acoustic measures. Twelve speakers, six males and six females, were instructed to produce /a/ sustained vowel for three seconds at a comfortable pitch and loudness level without any instruction and with a target matching procedure of either a certain f0 or SPL separately with visual and auditory feedback. The range of pitch for females and males were presented by progressing up and down randomly at intervals of 5Hz from 150 Hz to 310 Hz (total 33 frequency targets) and from 85 Hz to 190 Hz (total 22 frequency targets), respectively. The loudness levels were 65, 75, 85, 95 dB (total of four intensity targets) for both males and females. Subjective estimations of comfortable levels were obtained using a 10-point equal-appearing interval rating scale following each phonation. The results showed that males and females demonstrated similar trends in loudness levels with greatest comfort at 75 dB, whereas pitch comfort ratings showed a greater variability with females having a wider range with target matching. In the comfort levels of individuals, most male and female speakers rated higher comfort at soft, rather than loud phonations. On the other hand, most male speakers perceived highest comfort levels below the comfort pitch levels they phonated under natural conditions. Higher frequency ranges, however, were perceived to be more comfortable than those of natural condition in most female speakers, although the comfortable pitch levels in spontaneous phonations were within the comfort level ranges determined by targeted phonations. When comparing acoustic (%jitter, %shimmer, SNR) and EGG measures (CQ%) between spontaneous comfortable phonations and targeted phonations produced by the same subject at similar f0 and intensity, no significant differences were observed (p>0.05). Thus, target matching procedures may be considered a compatible and alternative method to reduce the variability of comfortable pitch and loudness levels by eliciting consistent comfortable phonations.

Oral configurations during vowel nasalization in English