Relationship between tongue positions and formant frequencies in female speakers

,
Jimin Lee , Susan Shaiman, and Gary WeismerLK

Citation: The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 139, 426 (2016); doi: 10.1121/1.4939894
View online: http://dx.doi.org/10.1121/1.4939894
View Table of Contents: http://asa.scitation.org/toc/jas/139/1
Published by the Acoustical Society of America

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Hyperarticulation in Lombard speech: Global coordination of the jaw, lips and the tongue
The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 139, (2016); 10.1121/1.4939495
Relationship between tongue positions and formant frequencies
in female speakers
Jimin Lee,1,a) Susan Shaiman,2 and Gary Weismer3
1
Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders, The Pennsylvania State University,
404A Ford Building, University Park, Pennsylvania 16802, USA
2
Department of Communication Science and Disorders, University of Pittsburgh, 4033 Forbes Tower,
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania 15260, USA
3
Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders, University of Wisconsin-Madison,
1975 Willow Drive, Madison, Wisconsin 53706, USA
(Received 10 November 2014; revised 15 December 2015; accepted 31 December 2015; published
online 21 January 2016)
This study examined the relationship (1) between acoustic vowel space and the corresponding
tongue kinematic vowel space and (2) between formant frequencies (F1 and F2) and tongue x-y
coordinates for the same time sampling point. Thirteen healthy female adults participated in this
study. Electromagnetic articulography and synchronized acoustic recordings were utilized to obtain
vowel acoustic and tongue kinematic data across ten speech tasks. Intra-speaker analyses showed
that for 10 of the 13 speakers the acoustic vowel space was moderately to highly correlated with
tongue kinematic vowel space; much weaker correlations were obtained for inter-speaker analyses.
Correlations of individual formants with tongue positions showed that F1 varied strongly with
tongue position variations in the y dimension, whereas F2 was correlated in equal magnitude with
variations in the x and y positions. For within-speaker analyses, the size of the acoustic vowel space
is likely to provide a reasonable inference of size of the tongue working space for most speakers;
unfortunately there is no a priori, obvious way to identify the speakers for whom the covariation is
not significant. A second conclusion is that F1 variations reflect tongue height, but F2 is a much
more complex reflection of tongue variation in both dimensions.
C 2016 Acoustical Society of America. [http://dx.doi.org/10.1121/1.4939894]
V

[LK] Pages: 426–440

I. INTRODUCTION the interpretation of acoustic vowel space areas generated

from F1 and F2 measurements of the four English corner
The place and degree of vocal tract constriction play a
vowels. Specifically, acoustic vowel space areas have been
significant role in vowel production and differ by target vow-
interpreted as reflecting articulatory working spaces (Neel,
els (Fant, 1960). Vocal tract configuration for vowel produc-
2008). The interpretation is, all other things being as nearly
tion involves the whole vocal cavity (e.g., lips, tongue, hard
equal as possible, a larger acoustic vowel space implies
palate, pharyngeal wall, etc.). However, the place and degree
greater average differences between constriction degree and
of vocal tract constriction are primarily controlled by posi-
location across the corner vowels, as compared to a smaller
tion of the tongue (Stevens and House, 1955; Fant, 1960).
acoustic vowel space (see relevant analyses in Wang et al.,
As a result of the relationship between the place and degree
2013). This interpretation has had a significant impact on
of vocal tract constriction for vowels and formant frequen-
various fields, especially in speech-language pathology and
cies, assumptions of simplified relationships between tongue
more general studies of acoustic phonetics.
position and formant frequencies have been generalized in
In speech-language pathology, acoustic vowel space has
the field. Traditional and more contemporary tube models
been utilized to characterize speech motor skills of speakers
(Fant, 1960; Arai, 2012), electrical circuit models (Stevens
with various disorders, such as motor speech disorders and
and House, 1955), human reproductions of Fant’s nomo-
hearing impairment. Across many studies and disorders, a
grams (Ladefoged and Bladon, 1982), and a recent, joint lin-
strong relationship between size of the acoustic vowel space
gual kinematic and formant frequency analysis (Wang et al.,
and speech intelligibility has been documented (Weismer
2013) largely support these assumptions. The assumptions
et al., 2001; Tjaden and Wilding, 2004). Some researchers
are that in general the first formant frequency (F1) increases
have argued that measures of the acoustic vowel space are
as the constricted area becomes larger, and the second form-
sensitive to subtle, disease-related reductions in articulatory
ant frequency (F2) increases as the constricted area is located
function even in the absence of perceptual evidence of a dis-
more anteriorly.
turbance in vowel production (Skodda et al., 2012). Even
This understanding of the relationship between the first
among normal speakers, a relationship between size of the
two formant frequencies and tongue position has influenced
acoustic vowel space and speech intelligibility has been
claimed (Bradlow et al., 1996). The results of these studies
provide support for a meaningful link between acoustic
a)
Electronic mail: JXL91@psu.edu and articulatory measures of vowel production, with the

426 J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 139 (1), January 2016 0001-4966/2016/139(1)/426/15/$30.00 C 2016 Acoustical Society of America
V
implication for therapeutic enhancements of speech intelligi-
bility via well-differentiated tongue placements and move-
ments for vowels.
In work on acoustic phonetics, researchers have reported
an association between acoustic vowel space and manipula-
tions of speech rate, intensity, and clarity. For example,
larger acoustic vowel spaces were observed in clear speech,
which was interpreted as an outcome of exaggerated articu-
latory behavior and therefore greater distinctiveness between
the corner vowels (Smiljanic and Bradlow, 2005). Larger
acoustic vowel spaces were also observed in slower speech
when compared to faster speech (Fourakis, 1991), and in
louder as compared to habitual speech (Tjaden and Wilding,
2004). In addition to rate, intensity, and clarity, consonant
environment was also found to influence the acoustic vowel
space. Iivonen (1995) reported different dispersion patterns
of Finnish vowels in an F1-F2 plot, depending on consonant
context. For example, vowels in the /h/-vowel-/h/ context
generated a larger vowel space than vowels in the alveolar
consonant context (/t/-vowel-/t/). Iivonen’s interpretation
was that smaller lingual distinctions between vowels were
made in the /t/-vowel-/t/ context. The same differences
between acoustic vowel spaces for /h/-vowel-/d/ (/hVd/) ver-
sus /d/-vowel-/d/ (/dVd/) contexts can be extrapolated from
data published by Stevens and House (1963) and
Hillenbrand et al. (2001).
The traditional method to obtain the size of the acoustic
vowel space is to measure F1 and F2 at the temporal mid-
point (or a nearby point in time) of corner vowels. The mid-
point is measured to minimize potential coarticulatory
effects from surrounding consonants. As noted above, vowel
spaces measured in this way have been reported as signifi-
cant predictors of speech intelligibility in speakers with vari-
ous disorders (e.g., dysarthria, hearing-impairment).
In previous studies, the relationship between formant
frequencies and tongue positions has been observed descrip-
tively and by means of dimension-reducing statistical analy-
sis. Tongue kinematic vowel space was examined in a single
subject by Alfonso and Baer (1982) using cinefluorography,
and in four speakers with and without Down syndrome by
Bunton and Leddy (2011) using x-ray microbeam data
(Westbury, 1994). Bunton and Leddy (2011) reported that
the relationships among acoustic vowel space, articulatory
working space (tongue kinematic vowel space), and speech
intelligibility were descriptively positive, that is, larger
acoustic vowel spaces were associated with larger articula-
tory spaces and increased speech intelligibility. More
recently, Wang et al. (2013) quantified articulatory vowel
space in neurologically healthy women using a signal-
processing scheme in which different vowel categories were
characterized as shapes derived from tongue position data
across the duration of the vowels. Wang et al. (2013) did not
test the relationship between acoustic and tongue kinematic
vowel spaces statistically; however, the dispersion pattern of
articulatory vowel shapes derived in Wang et al. (2013)
closely resembled an acoustic vowel space constructed from
formant frequency measures collected synchronously with
the kinematic data. The joint kinematic-acoustic analysis in
Wang et al. (2013) added validity to the assumption that
J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 139 (1), January 2016
distinctiveness of vowel formant frequencies serves as a rea-
sonable proxy for the distinctiveness of underlying lingual
positions.
Despite the frequent inferences made from formant fre-
quencies to tongue positions for vowels, empirical demon-
stration of the goodness of these inferences has not received
adequate attention. If the generalized concept of a relation-
ship between the first two formant frequencies and tongue
position is true, the variance of one variable (e.g., formant
frequency) that is explained by another (e.g., the x or y coor-
dinates for tongue position) should be substantial. The cur-
rent study approaches this question from two perspectives.
First, the relationship of acoustic and articulatory vowel
spaces is really a derived measure from multiple correspond-
ences between tongue positions and formant frequencies: if
acoustic vowel space as measured in the traditional method
reflects tongue kinematic vowel space, the correlation
between the two should be high when both are measured at
(or very close to) the same time sampling point. Second, fol-
lowing work of Ladefoged et al. (1978), McGowan and
Berger (2009), Mefferd and Green (2010), Dromey et al.
(2013), and Wang et al. (2013), specific relationships are
explored between tongue position variation in the x and y
dimensions and variation of the first and second formant fre-
quencies. The first question concerns the ability to infer lin-
gual working space for vowels from acoustic vowel spaces,
the second question the ability to infer specific variations in
the dimensions of tongue height and advancement from vari-
ation in F1 and F2.
One of the challenges in testing the relationship between
acoustic and tongue kinematic vowel spaces is the broad
issue of differences across speakers. Speakers have different
vocal tract sizes, the effect of which on formant frequencies
is well documented (Lee et al., 1999). Evidence also exists
for different articulatory kinematic patterns in male and
female speakers, even when producing the same segments
(Simpson, 2001). In addition, variable articulatory patterns
within and across gender may depend on relative lengths of
the oral and pharyngeal tracts (Fuchs et al., 2008). Like
Wang et al. (2013), the present study used female speakers
only to control at least one major variable (sex-related vocal
tract size) in the determination of articulatory kinematic-
vowel acoustic relations. In addition, to obtain variation in
size of the vowel space but maintain the ability to perform
intra-speaker analyses and therefore control the potential
effect of variation in vocal tract size on either articulatory or
acoustic data, or both, ten different speech tasks (two conso-
nant environments combined with five levels of rate and in-
tensity) were utilized to evaluate within-speaker covariation
of lingual position and vowel formant frequency data. A sim-
ilar manipulation was employed by Mefferd and Green
(2010) to study the relationship between distance traveled by
a single point on the tongue and the change in F1-F2 space
for a low-back to high-front vowel sequence.
In summary, acoustic vowel space has been claimed and
assumed to reflect tongue kinematic space; however, this
relationship has been tested or quantified minimally in
speech production. The following research questions were
addressed in the current study:
Lee et al. 427
(1) What is the relationship between the acoustic vowel
space and tongue kinematic vowel space at both intra-
and inter-speaker levels of analysis? Consistent with the
typical concept of vowel “targets” and their use in quan-
tification of size of the vowel space, it was hypothesized
that at a single measurement point in time there is a stat-
istically positive relationship between acoustically and
kinematically determined vowel spaces. The strength of
this relationship, both within and across speakers,
remains an open question.
(2) At a more fine-grained level, what is the relationship
between formant frequencies and tongue positions for
vowel production? For the /hVd/ frame and ten American
English vowels, it was hypothesized that a large amount
of variance in F1 can be explained by variations in
inferred tongue height (from the y dimension of tongue
position), and in F2 by variations in inferred tongue
advancement (from the x dimension of tongue position).
II. METHOD
A. Participants
Thirteen healthy female adults between 20 and 23 years
of age participated in this study. All participants were from
the Middle-Atlantic Northeast region of the United States
(12 from Pennsylvania and one from Syracuse, New York).
All participants met the following criteria: (a) no known
speech, language, or cognitive disorders; (b) native speaker
of American English; and (c) normal hearing as evidenced
by passing a pure tone hearing screening bilaterally at 25 dB
for the frequencies 500, 1000, 2000, and 4000 Hz. The cur-
rent study was approved by the Institutional Review Board
of the University of Pittsburgh.
B. Materials
Each target word contained one of the four corner vow-
els /i, u, A, æ/ in /hVd/ and /dVd/ consonant environments to
generate vowel spaces for two different phonetic contexts. In
addition, the monophthongs, /I, E, U, O, ˆ, o/ were collected
in the /hVd/ frame to provide a finer test of the relationship
between individual formant frequencies and tongue posi-
tions. The addition of non-corner vowels for this finer-
grained analysis (hypothesis 2, above) was deemed neces-
sary because the corner vowels alone would yield confirma-
tion of the hypothesis (i.e., only the extremes of the vowel
space would be included in the analysis, forcing high cova-
riation between the acoustic and kinematic data). All /hVd/
and /dVd/ stimuli were embedded in the carrier phrase “I say
a ___ again.” Participants read the materials from English
orthography. Before the recording, all participants read out
all the stimuli and practiced accurate pronunciation of the
target words. Participants practiced less common and/or con-
fusing words such as “dud” /dˆd/ and “hod” /hAd/ until they
produced the desired vowels.
Five different speaking styles (habitual, fast, slow, soft,
and loud) were employed in this study, and evoked in the
same fashion as in previous studies (Tjaden and Wilding,
2004; Mefferd and Green, 2010). For rate variation, speakers
428 J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 139 (1), January 2016
were asked to halve (slow speech) or double (fast speech)
their habitual rate to produce the varied-rate conditions.
Similarly, the varied loudness conditions were elicited by
requesting speakers to halve (soft condition) or double (loud
condition) their habitual speaking loudness, with the added
proviso that the soft condition be produced without whisper-
ing. Each target word was repeated three times in each con-
dition. The combination of two consonant environments
with five different speaking styles was employed to obtain a
varied range of acoustic and tongue kinematic vowel spaces
for intra-speaker analyses. The habitual condition was
always produced first; thereafter each speaker produced con-
ditions and words in a randomized order.
C. Procedures
The Carstens AG-200, two-dimensional electromagnetic
articulograph (EMA), was used to record tongue positions
with a synchronized audio recording. Three sensors were
attached to each speaker’s tongue along the midsagittal
plane: one close to the tongue tip, one on the body, and one
on the dorsum. The tongue tip sensor was positioned approx-
imately 10 mm back from the tongue tip, the tongue body
sensor approximately 15 mm back from the tongue tip sen-
sor, and the tongue dorsum sensor approximately 15 mm
back from the tongue body sensor. Euclidean distances
between tongue sensors were measured with EMA sensor
location data while speakers were in a still and relaxed posi-
tion with their mouth closed. The average Euclidean distance
between tongue tip and body sensors across the 13 speakers
was 17 mm with a standard deviation of 5 mm; the average
distance between tongue body and dorsum sensors was
15 mm with a standard deviation of 3 mm. Two reference
sensors were used, one on the bridge of the nose and the
other on the gingiva above the two upper central incisors. A
bite plane was recorded before the speech tasks for post-
data-collection processing.
Each speaker had a 3-min warm-up time at the begin-
ning of the session to get used to the sensors on the tongue
while speaking. During the warm-up time, speakers pro-
duced conversational speech and the Rainbow Passage
(Fairbanks, 1960). A synchronized speech signal was
recorded via a lavalier microphone placed 4 in. from the sub-
ject’s mouth. The speech acoustic signal was digitized with
12-bit resolution at 16 000 Hz and stored synchronously with
kinematic data on a computer hard-drive. Kinematic data
were sampled at 200 Hz and stored directly on a computer
hard-drive. On the basis of this sampling rate for kinematic
data, two consecutive kinematic data points were separated
in time by 5 ms (see Sec. II D).
D. Analysis of acoustic data
Acoustic measures were obtained from the digital
speech samples using a wideband spectrographic display in
TF32 (Milenkovic, 2002), following established measure-
ment criteria (Kent and Read, 2001, pp. 71–137). The fol-
lowing acoustic measurements were obtained for each of the
target stimulus words produced by each participant: vowel
duration; average dB root mean square (RMS) across the
Lee et al.
vowel duration; and the first two formant frequencies (F1
and F2) at the temporal midpoint of the vowel.
When locating the temporal midpoint of the vowel, the
time sampling point for formant frequency measures was
adjusted to the nearest time sample for the kinematic data.
This adjustment required changing the sampling point for
formant frequency measures by no more than 2.5 ms from
the “true” temporal midpoint of the vowel. F1 and F2 were
measured in hertz using both the spectrographic and spec-
trum display in TF32, with a 30 ms window centered at the
adjusted sampling point for the acoustic data. The formant
frequency values were obtained manually, using the LPC
solutions on the spectrum display (superimposed on the fast
Fourier transform) together with the spectrographic display.
Vowel durations were measured primarily to verify the
speaking rate manipulations, and relative vowel sound pressure
levels were measured to verify the speech loudness manipula-
tions. A total of 10 920 acoustic measurements were made
in the current study: [2 (consonant environments)  4 (corner
vowels)  5 (speaking conditions)  3 (repetitions)  13 (par-
ticipants)  4 (acoustic measures)] þ [6 (other monophthongs)
 5 (speaking conditions)  3 (repetitions)  13 (participants)
 4 (acoustic measures)]. From these formant frequency meas-
urements, acoustic vowel space area was calculated in Hz2
using the following polygon area formula described by
Johnson et al. (2004): area ¼ 1/2 (F1/i/F2/u/  F1/u/F2/i/) þ 1/
2 (F1/u/F2/A/  F1/A/F2/u/) þ 1/2 (F1/A/F2/æ/  F1/æ/F2/A/)
þ 1/2 (F1/æ/F2/i/  F1/i/F2/æ/).
1. Reliability
Inter-judge reliability was obtained for all acoustic
measures. A second judge, trained in acoustic analyses,
measured 12% of the full set of acoustic data. Pearson
product-moment coefficients and absolute differences
between the first and second sets of measures were calcu-
lated to obtain reliability data. Correlation values for the
four acoustic variables ranged between 0.98 and 0.99. The
mean absolute differences were 9.2 ms (vowel duration),
0.25 dB (dB RMS), 14 Hz (F1), and 27 Hz (F2). The reliabil-
ity data for formant frequency measures are consistent with
those reported in prior investigations and are within the ac-
ceptable range of error (Monsen and Engebretson, 1983).
E. Analysis of kinematic data
Kinematic data were rotated according to each speaker’s
bite plane and smoothed using the Tailor software program
(Carstens Medizinelektronik GmbH, Germany) prior to the
analyses. The kinematic data were rotated so that the bite
plane of each speaker was parallel to the x axis.
1. Positional normalization of tongue kinematic data
Secondary to the issue of individual differences across
speakers, the normalization of articulator position needs to
be handled carefully for data comparison across speakers.
Depending on the purpose of the study, the unit of move-
ment data has been transformed and mapped onto a model of
an average speaker (Geng and Mooshammer, 2009; Wang
J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 139 (1), January 2016
et al., 2013), or the occlusal (bite plane) and central maxil-
lary planes have been used with data expressed within this
coordinate system (Westbury, 1994).
For the purpose of the current study, the raw unit (milli-
meters) of tongue position measurement was maintained for
evaluation of covariance between articulatory positions and
formant frequencies (including the derived vowel spaces
from these measures). Therefore, previously utilized meth-
ods that require unit changes for articulatory positional nor-
malization were not employed. Initially, a reference sensor
attached to the gingiva between the upper incisors was
applied as the origin of the coordinate system (Westbury,
1994). However, in the treated data, a significant discrepancy
in tongue position data along the x axis was observed in one
speaker when compared with other speakers. Specifically,
speaker P3 presented more posterior tongue body x positions
(approximately 20 mm on average) than other speakers. The
distribution of data points within the outlying cluster along
the x axis was found to be consistent with the distributions
observed in other speakers. It was speculated that the outly-
ing data points for P3 were secondary to anatomical differen-
ces in the speaker such as the thickness or shape of the
maxillary gingiva or alveolar process. In addition, even
among the data points of the remaining 12 speakers, slight
discrepancies in tongue position data were observed [e.g.,
superior and anterior tongue positions (high y and low x
coordinate values) in P1; superior tongue positions in P2 and
P10; and inferior tongue positions (low y) in P6].
To resolve this issue, the centroid position was calcu-
lated across the corner vowels, without unit transformation,
within speakers for each tongue sensor. The centroid value
of each speaker represents a neutral position of each tongue
region during vowel production. Use of the centroid for the
tongue kinematic data did not influence the units of the kine-
matic vowel space, hence, the relationship between acoustic
and tongue kinematic vowel space remained the same after
processing the data according to the centroid. In sum, in the
current study (1) kinematic data were rotated according to
each speaker’s bite plane; (2) the centroid position for each
speaker was calculated for each tongue sensor based on the
corner vowel position data across the ten speech tasks; and
(3) the centroid value of each speaker was utilized as the
coordinate of the origin (0, 0). For example, if the original
tongue body x and y values of /A/ for a given speaker were
(130, 115) and the calculated centroid values of the tongue
body sensor were (120, 125), the converted tongue body x
and y values of /A/ in P1 were (10, 10) (130–120 and
115–125, respectively). Centroid values for speaker normal-
ization have been used previously in treating vowel acoustic
data (Nearey, 1978). For the current study, we employed this
approach to resolve the tongue positional discrepancy dis-
cussed above. In this way, the relative positional changes
across ten speech tasks within a speaker were maintained,
and the comparison of tongue position across speakers was
feasible without losing the original unit.
For each vowel, the x-y coordinate data of each sensor
were measured using the EMALYSE program (Carstens
Medizinelektronik GmbH, Germany) at the time sampling
point where the formant frequencies were measured. With the
Lee et al. 429
TABLE I. Pearson correlation coefficient values (r-values) between acoustic vowel space and kinematic vowel space across speakers (inter-speaker analyses)
in each speaking style. The sample size of 26 in each speaking style is from 13 speakers and two consonant environments.

Condition Sample size (n) Tongue tip vowel space Tongue body vowel space Tongue dorsum vowel space
a a
Habitual 26 0.580 0.554 0.483b
Fast 26 0.397b 0.406b 0.429b
Loud 26 0.294 0.443b 0.409b
Slow 26 0.193 0.204 0.342
Soft 26 0.283 0.232 0.448b
All conditions 130 0.384b 0.414b 0.451b

a
p-value < 0.01.
b
p-value < 0.05.

x-y coordinate data of the four corner vowels, tongue kine-
matic vowel space was calculated for each of the three sensors
using the formula presented above (Sec. II D; Johnson et al.,
2004). The x and y coordinate values were used in place of the
F1 and F2 values to obtain tongue kinematic vowel spaces.
F. Experimental design and analysis
The current study employed a 2 (two consonants)  5
(rate and loudness) repeated measures analysis for vowel du-
ration and dB RMS measures to examine the protocol for
eliciting the targeted rate and intensity changes. This design
was also employed to evaluate variation of acoustic vowel
space and all three tongue kinematic vowel spaces (tongue
tip, tongue body, and tongue dorsum) across speaking styles.
When a significant main effect was observed across speaking
styles, each speaking style was compared to the habitual
speaking style using post hoc tests.
To address the research question regarding the acoustic
and tongue kinematic vowel space relationship at the intra-
speaker level, Spearman’s rank correlation coefficients were
utilized because of the relatively low n (n ¼ 10, from ten speech
tasks). To examine the relationship between acoustic and
tongue kinematic vowel space at the inter-speaker level,
Pearson product-moment correlation coefficients were used
because of the larger n (n ¼ 13 speakers  2 consonant environ-
ments); n’s for the inter- and intra-speaker analyses of vowel
space covariation are reported in Tables I and IV, respectively.
To examine the relationship between individual formant
frequencies (F1, F2) and individual tongue positions (x and y
positions), Pearson product-moment correlation coefficients
and a simultaneous method of multiple linear regression
were utilized. For the regression models, tongue x and y val-
ues were entered into two different blocks. The same model
with a different order of variables within the block (e.g.,
tongue x in the first block, tongue y in the second block;
TABLE II. Pearson r-values between formant frequency and tongue x-y coordinates across 13 speakers.
tongue y in the first block and tongue x in the second block)
was administered to obtain variance partitions. More specifi-
cally, the method was chosen to obtain variance values in
formant frequencies explained by only tongue x position,
only tongue y position, and both tongue x and y positions
(shared variance) by examining incremental R2 changes. An
alpha level of 0.05 was employed in all analyses as the crite-
rion of statistical significance.
III. RESULTS
A. Verification of speaking style manipulations
The data showed that each condition yielded the expected
differences compared to the habitual condition (Table III).
Omnibus tests for vowel duration [F(4,96) ¼ 73.02, p < 0.001]
and sound pressure level [F(4,96) ¼ 176.86, p < 0.001] were
significant. In the /hVd/ condition, the average vowel duration
was 46 ms shorter in the fast speaking style [F(1,24) ¼ 62.07,
p < 0.001] and 79 ms longer in the slow speaking style
[F(1,24) ¼ 72.97, p < 0.001] as compared to the habitual
speaking style. The loud and soft speaking styles were 8 dB
greater [F(1,24) ¼ 141. 80, p < 0.001] and 5 dB less
[F(1,24) ¼ 152.15, p < 0.001], respectively, when compared
to the habitual speaking style. Task effects for the /dVd/ con-
dition were similar in magnitude.
B. Relationship of acoustic and articulatory spaces:
Corner vowels
A significant consonant environment effect was observed
for the acoustic vowel space and all tongue kinematic vowel
spaces. The direction of the effect was that, in the /dVd/ conso-
nant environment, both acoustic and tongue kinematic spaces
(tongue tip, body, and dorsum) were significantly smaller than
in the /hVd/ environment. Although this effect (reduction of
vowel space from /hVd/ to /dVd/ contexts) can be inferred

Tongue regions

Formant frequency Tongue coordinate Sample size (n) Tongue tip Tongue body Tongue dorsum
a a
F1 x 2715 0.436 0.397 0.199a
F1 y 2715 0.788a 0.821a 0.818a
F2 x 2710 0.601a 0.620a 0.413a
F2 y 2710 0.546a 0.666a 0.593a

a
p-value < 0.01.

430 J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 139 (1), January 2016 Lee et al.
TABLE III. Average and standard deviation values of vowel duration (ms), vowel intensity (dB), acoustic and tongue kinematic vowel space (Hz2 and mm2,
respectively) across the 13 speakers. The dB values are expressed as differences from the habitual /hVd/ condition (reference value ¼ 0).

Condition Duration (ms) RMS (dB) Acoustic vowel space (Hz2) Tongue tip (mm2) Tongue body (mm2) Tongue dorsum (mm2)

/hVd/ Average 153.00 0 392 625 39.28 54.48 42.69

Habitual SD 40.27 4.94 97 758 25.57 34.13 32.79
/hVd/ Average 107.24 0.15 285 774 23.94 33.65 28.92
Fast SD 28.54 4.73 117 916 15.86 21.62 15.36
/hVd/ Average 149.62 7.56 403 856 37.51 59.15 47.71
Loud SD 25.45 4.40 122 316 23.93 39.98 30.15
/hVd/ Average 232.18 3.03 412 433 25.75 44.46 37.39
Slow SD 72.38 5.28 103 499 17.34 21.40 16.95
/hVd/ Average 149.19 5.51 342 619 15.46 25.98 25.64
Soft SD 36.72 4.84 146 760 13.53 20.67 18.91
/dVd/ Average 179.31 0.56 264 724 19.17 27.16 22.41
Habitual SD 40.79 5.18 98 764 12.76 16.00 11.45
/dVd/ Average 124.03 1.6 166 197 13.30 18.39 13.00
Fast SD 12.58 5.09 80 815 11.58 9.22 7.92
/dVd/ Average 209.16 7.49 272 600 19.24 31.49 29.48
Loud SD 55.90 4.40 92 043 16.28 23.93 19.42
/dVd/ Average 265.12 1.78 269 790 20.98 25.84 19.34
Slow SD 47.43 4.86 66 888 9.21 19.09 12.26
/dVd/ Average 184.32 4.9 248 098 12.83 17.74 15.94
Soft SD 47.28 4.42 82 626 7.27 15.06 14.37

from previous studies (e.g., Stevens and House, 1963; vowels toward the top of the plots. On the kinematic plots, in
Hillenbrand et al., 2001), to our knowledge this is the first which the origin of the coordinate space is based on the
report of the corresponding lingual space reduction when the speaker-specific centroids described above, increasingly nega-
two contexts are compared. Table III presents the average and tive x values indicate tongue points closer to the lips whereas
standard deviation values of each acoustic and tongue kine- increasingly positive y values indicate tongue points closer to
matic vowel space across the 13 speakers. the superior, palatal boundaries of the vocal tract. The general
Figure 1 shows the consonant environment effect on correspondence of reduced vowel space for both acoustic and
acoustic and tongue body kinematic vowel spaces. Among the kinematic measures should be understood with respect to cer-
three tongue regions (tongue tip, body, and dorsum), the kine- tain differences between the reduction effects for the two meas-
matic vowel space of the tongue body was chosen for Fig. 1 ures. For example, the reduction of acoustic vowel space from
because it tended to have the strongest relationship with acous- /hVd/ to /dVd/ is primarily the result of F2 changes for the
tic vowel space (see Table IV). In this and all subsequent fig- high vowels, with a particularly large contribution from the F2
ures showing acoustic and kinematic vowel spaces, the corner change for /u/. This disproportionate change for F2 of /u/ when
vowels are arranged with front vowels to the left and high preceded by an alveolar consonant is consistent with data
reported by Stevens and House (1963) and Hillenbrand et al.
TABLE IV. Spearman’s rank correlation coefficient values between acous- (2001). On the other hand, average changes from the /hVd/ to /
tic vowel space and tongue kinematic vowel space across the speech tasks dVd/ context for x-y tongue positions, measured for nearly
(n ¼ 10), within each individual.
identical time samples as the formant frequency measurements,
Tongue tip Tongue body Tongue dorsum indicate an effect for all vowels. Most, but not all these posi-
Speaker vowel space vowel space sowel space tion effects are in the expected direction of reduction of posi-
tion along either the x or y axes of the movement coordinate
P1 0.455 0.939a 0.952a
space. For example, both /æ/ and /A/ are less low in /dVd/ as
P2 0. 855a 0.879a 0.527
P3 0.394 0.745b 0.564
compared to /hVd/ utterances, and /æ/ is less forward in the
P4 0.685b 0.636b 0.224 former as compared to the latter. Similarly, in /dVd/ utterances
P5 0.188 0.152 0.358 /i/ is less forward and /u/ more forward as compared to their
P6 0.721b 0.661b 0.697b positions along the x axis in /hVd/ utterances. The higher
P7 0.236 0.418 0.455 (greater mean y values) /i/ and /u/ in /dVd/ as compared to /
P8 0.794a 0.709b 0.624 hVd/ utterances seem to provide evidence against the expecta-
P9 0.164 0.842a 0.794a tion for articulatory reduction, at least when expressed strictly
P10 0.650b 0.661b 0.588 in terms of a tongue position in a single dimension.
P11 0.612 0.527 0.830a
A significant main effect of speaking style was observed
P12 0.588 0.733b 0.830a
for both the acoustic vowel space [F (4, 96) ¼ 15.17,
P13 0.127 0.067 0.152
p < 0.001] and all three tongue kinematic vowel spaces [F(4,
a
p-value < 0.01. 96) ¼ 8.48; F (4, 96) ¼ 11.68; F (4, 96) ¼ 8.15, for tip, body,
b
p-value < 0.05. and dorsum, respectively, all three: p < 0.001]. Figure 2

J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 139 (1), January 2016 Lee et al. 431
FIG. 1. Average acoustic vowel space (a) and tongue body kinematic vowel
space (b) for different consonant environments (/hVd/ and /dVd/) in habitual
condition. The vertical and anterior-posterior tongue body positions were
measured relative to the respective mean positions of vowels for each speaker.
shows the speaking style effect on acoustic and tongue kine-
matic vowel spaces. A larger acoustic vowel space was
observed in the habitual speaking style as compared to the
fast speaking style [F(1,24) ¼ 39.657, p < 0.001]. For tongue
kinematic vowel spaces, larger spaces were observed at all
three tongue locations for the habitual speaking style as com-
pared to the fast speaking style [F(1,24) ¼ 9.36, p ¼ 0.005;
F(1,24) ¼ 14.81, p ¼ 0.001; and F(1,24) ¼ 8.10, p ¼ 0.009,
for tip, body, and dorsum, respectively] and to the soft
speaking style [F(1,24) ¼ 24.23, p < 0.001; F(1,24) ¼ 19.29,
p-value < 0.001; F(1,24) ¼ 8.43, p-value ¼ 0.008].
1. Intra-speaker analyses
Ten acoustic vowel spaces and ten tongue kinematic
vowel spaces (five speaking styles  2 consonant environ-
ments) were correlated across tasks within each speaker.
Figure 3 shows an example of the ten different acoustic and
tongue body kinematic vowel spaces for a selected speaker
(P1). Variation across tasks in the size of this speaker’s
acoustic and articulatory vowel spaces is obvious; data from
other speakers showed the same cross-task variability, in dif-
fering degrees. Table IV shows the Spearman rank correla-
tion coefficients by speaker for each tongue kinematic vowel
space against acoustic vowel space. The greatest number of
statistically significant correlations was obtained for the
432 J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 139 (1), January 2016
FIG. 2. Average (a) acoustic vowel space and (b) tongue body kinematic
vowel space for different speaking styles. The vertical and anterior-posterior
tongue body positions were measured relative to the respective mean posi-
tions of vowels for each speaker.
tongue body sensor, for which 9 of 13 speakers had signifi-
cant correlations in the expected direction (greater acoustic
spaces associated with greater articulatory vowel spaces),
ranging in magnitude from 0.661 to 0.939. Ten of the 13
speakers had at least one tongue sensor area significantly
correlated with area of the acoustic vowel space, and 8 of the
13 speakers had at least two sensors whose areas were signif-
icantly correlated with area of the acoustic vowel space.
Three speakers (P5, P7, P13) had no significant associations
between the areas of the two spaces.
2. Inter-speaker analyses
Table I shows the Pearson correlation coefficient values
(r-values) among acoustic and tongue kinematic vowel
spaces across speakers in each speaking style. The bottom
row in Table I shows r-values for acoustic vowel space
against tongue kinematic vowel space in the full data set,
across all conditions and speakers (n ¼ 130). All correlations
for the habitual condition were significant but, on average,
weaker than those of the intra-speaker analysis (Table IV).
Correlations in the other conditions were sometimes signifi-
cant, but always weaker than those in the habitual condition.
(There is the possibility that the inter-speaker correlations
Lee et al.
FIG. 3. (a) Acoustic vowel spaces and (b) tongue body kinematic vowel
spaces across the ten speech tasks (two consonant environments, five speak-
ing styles) for a selected speaker (P1). The vertical and anterior-posterior
tongue body positions were measured relative to the respective mean posi-
tion (tongue body centroid) of vowels for P1. Solid lines show vowel spaces
in /hVd/ environment, dotted lines vowel spaces in /dVd/ environment.
between acoustic and kinematic vowel spaces might be
improved by additional scaling of the kinematic data, specif-
ically by dividing by individual speaker, kinematic vowel-
space area. This analysis was performed and yielded results
essentially identical to those reported in Table I.)
C. Individual formant frequencies and tongue
positions
The relationships between F1, F2 and tongue x and y coor-
dinates were examined for each of the three tongue sensors
(tongue tip, body and dorsum). These analyses included the
acoustic and position data for all ten monophthongs. Consistent
and significant covariation between tongue kinematic and
acoustic data was observed for the tongue body sensor. Figures
4 and 5 show scatterplots of tongue body x and y coordinates
against F1 (Fig. 4), and F2 (Fig. 5) across ten monophthongs
produced by the 13 speakers. Analyses were performed on
these data at both the intra- and inter-speaker levels.
1. Intra-speaker analyses
When data were evaluated within speaker but across
vowels and speaking conditions, F1 and F2 were significantly
correlated with both x and y coordinates for at least one of the
three tongue sensors. Appendixes A and B present within-
J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 139 (1), January 2016
FIG. 4. (Color online) Scatterplot of F1 and tongue body (a) x position and
(b) y position across 13 speakers. Individual speakers are shown by unique
colors of data points.
speaker Pearson r values between formant frequency and
tongue x-y coordinates for the tongue tip, body, and dorsum.
For the 13 speakers, the general pattern of the relation-
ships was positive for F1-x [higher F1 values for increasingly
positive x values, that is, to the right on the kinematic plots
such as Fig. 1(b)], negative for F1-y, negative for F2-x, and
positive for F2-y. These general trends are broadly consistent
with expectations from the acoustic theory of speech produc-
tion (Fant, 1960). That is, all other things being equal, F1 is
predicted by the theory to decrease slightly with tongue
advancement, especially for high vowels and from a starting
point roughly midway between /i/ and /u/ [Fig. 4(a); note posi-
tive correlation, Table II], and to increase substantially with
increased distance between the highest point on the tongue
and superior boundary of the vocal tract [Fig. 4(b)]; F2 is pre-
dicted to increase substantially with tongue advancement
[Fig. 5(a)] and to decrease with decreased distance between
the highest point on the tongue and the superior border of the
vocal tract, especially for back vowels [Fig. 5(b)].
At the intra-speaker level, the highest r-value across the
three tongue regions was examined in each speaker. The F1-x
correlations ranged between 0.20 and 0.74 with a mean of
0.45, and the F1-y correlations between 0.81 to 0.90, with
a mean across speakers of 0.87. Of all possible formant
frequency-tongue coordinate pairs (F1-x, F1-y, F2-x, and
F2-y), F1-y correlations showed the greatest magnitudes. The
Lee et al. 433
FIG. 5. (Color online) Scatterplot of F2 and tongue body (a) x position and
(b) y position across 13 speakers. Individual speakers are shown by unique
colors of data points.
F2-x correlations ranged between 0.56 and 0.88 with a
mean of 0.74, and the F2-y correlations between 0.44 and
0.83 with a mean of 0.71. The strongest correlations were
therefore for the traditional tongue height and tongue
advancement dimensions. Three subjects (P2, P4, P11)
showed F1-x or F2-x correlations in the direction opposite that
predicted from the acoustic theory of speech production.
2. Inter-speaker analyses: Variance partitions
When data were evaluated across individuals, vowels,
repetitions, and speaking conditions, F1 and F2 were moder-
ately to strongly correlated with both the x and y coordinates
of the tongue tip, body, and dorsum (Table II). At the inter-
speaker level, the relationship between F1 and the tongue y
coordinate was the strongest among the four formant-by-
tongue coordinate pairs (F1-x, F1-y, F2-x, and F2-y coordi-
nate pairs).
The amount of variance in formant frequencies
explained by tongue x and y positions is presented in Fig. 6,
using the multiple linear regression block models described
in Sec. II F. For each of the three sensors, the height of the
bar shows the total R2 value and the separate shadings show
individual contributions to the total R2 of tongue x and y
positions, respectively. Using the simultaneous method, a
434 J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 139 (1), January 2016
FIG. 6. Bar graphs of variance in (a) F1 and (b) F2 explained by tongue x-y
positions. The height of the bar shows the total R2 value and the separate shad-
ings show individual contributions to the total R2 of tongue x and y positions.
significant model for F1 emerged; tongue tip [F (2,
2709) ¼ 2328, p < 0.0001, adjusted R2 ¼ 0.632], body [F (2,
2712) ¼ 2703, p < 0.0001, adjusted R2 ¼ 0.674] and dorsum
[F (2, 2709) ¼ 2778, p < 0.0001, adjusted R2 ¼ 0.672]. With
the same method, a significant model for F2 was obtained:
tongue tip [F (2, 2707) ¼ 1165, p < 0.0001, adjusted
R2 ¼ 0.462], body [F (2, 2707) ¼ 1651, p < 0.0001, adjusted
R2 ¼ 0.549], and dorsum [F (2, 2707) ¼ 933, p < 0.0001,
adjusted R2 ¼ 0.408]. The 63% to 67% of F1 variance was
explained by tongue position, especially tongue y position.
The 41% to 55% of F2 variance was explained by tongue
position, both in the x and y dimensions. A notable amount
of variance in F2 was explained by both tongue body x and y
position (shared variance) [Fig. 6(b)]. The more posterior the
tongue region, the greater the explained variance in formant
frequencies by only tongue y position [Fig. 6(a)]; the more
anterior the tongue region, the greater the explained variance
in F2 solely by tongue x position [Fig. 6(b)].
IV. DISCUSSION
A. Acoustic and lingual vowel spaces: Intra-speaker
findings
The overall purpose of the current study was to obtain
simultaneous measurements of tongue positions and formant
Lee et al.
frequencies for productions of American English vowels,
and to evaluate the covariation between the two sets of
measures. The corner vowels of English were produced in
two “frames,” one the traditional /hVd/ frame meant to elicit
canonical articulation of a vowel, relatively free of coarticu-
latory influence (Stevens and House, 1963), and the other a
/dVd/ frame to promote deviation from this canonical articu-
lation, with the vowel presumably subject to greater coarti-
culatory influences. Formant frequencies were measured at a
single point in time during the vowel nucleus, and tongue
positions in the form of x-y coordinates were measured at the
same time (within the limits of the sampling-rate differences
for the acoustic and kinematic signals). Using a similar,
slice-in-time acoustic measurement for formant frequency
“targets,” Stevens and House (1963), and Hillenbrand et al.
(2001) showed that vowels in /dVd/ frames tended to under-
shoot target formant frequencies measured in /hVd/ frames.
Because this effect in Stevens and House (1963) and
Hillenbrand et al. (2001) appeared to be present for each of
the corner vowels, albeit in varying degrees, the overall
effect on the acoustic vowel space was a reduction in /dVd/
versus /hVd/ frames. This acoustic vowel space effect was
replicated in the current study (Table III, see data for habit-
ual condition), albeit with clear reduction effects for the high
vowels, but low vowels that seemed resistant to the conso-
nant context effect [see Fig. 1(a)]. A new finding of the cur-
rent study was the demonstration of smaller articulatory
spaces in /dVd/ frames as compared to /hVd/ frames, com-
puted from the x-y coordinates measured at the same point in
time as the formant frequencies from which the acoustic
vowel space was derived. Thus, a general articulatory reduc-
tion due to consonant context, expressed as a smaller area
enclosed by x-y lingual coordinates, has been demonstrated
in parallel with the expected reduction in the acoustic vowel
space. This finding verifies, to a limited extent as discussed
below, the frequently encountered assumption that articula-
tory inferences of vowel “working space” can be made, at
least within speakers, from the relative size of the acoustic
vowel space. For example, Berisha et al. (2014, p. 421) offer
the view that, “VSAs [vowel spaces areas] are acoustic
proxy for the kinematic displacements of the articulators,”
and Wenke et al. (2010, p. 204) state that, “spectral measures
of vowels…including vowel formants and subsequent vowel
space area, can provide useful information about articulatory
movement in dysarthria.” As noted by McGowan and Berger
(2009), assumptions such as these have been difficult to eval-
uate due to the scarcity of simultaneously collected position
and acoustic data in both healthy speakers and speakers with
speech disorders.
In the current study, the parallel reduction of the space
enclosed by lingual coordinates for corner vowels and the
first two formant frequencies may seem somewhat surpris-
ing. After all, formant frequencies are a product of the area
function of the entire vocal tract, and point-parameterized
articulatory measurements of tongue positions provide no in-
formation on the front (i.e., lips) or back (i.e., pharynx) ends
of the vocal tract. The question of changes in vowel working
spaces expressed by lingual positions on the one hand and
formant frequency measures on the other, and potential
J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 139 (1), January 2016
relationships between these two sets of measures, was
addressed in the current study by including within-speaker
manipulations of speaking style known to have an effect on
estimates of acoustic vowel space. Compared to the habitual
condition, the fast rate manipulation was expected to result
in smaller acoustic vowel spaces (Weismer et al., 2000), and
loud voice and slow rate were expected to result in larger
acoustic vowel spaces for most speakers (Tjaden et al.,
2013). Expectations of larger acoustic vowel spaces for slow
versus habitual speech, loud versus habitual speech, and ha-
bitual versus fast speech, were largely confirmed at the group
level for both /hVd/ and /dVd/ frames (Table III). The soft-
voice condition produced smaller acoustic vowel spaces than
the habitual condition, but not to the same extent as the fast
condition. Clearly though, the speaking condition manipula-
tions caused systematic, within-speaker variation in the size
of the acoustic vowel space. The important question was
whether the articulatory vowel spaces would vary in the
same way. At the group level, the answer seems to be a
qualified “yes.” Across phonetic contexts and conditions, the
articulatory vowel space varied from 12.8 to 39.3 mm2 for
the tongue tip, 17.7 to 59.2 mm2 for the tongue body, and
13.0 to 47.7 mm2 for the tongue dorsum (Table III). For each
of the three tongue points, with just a very few exceptions,
articulatory working space was smaller for fast rate and soft
voice as compared to habitual rate, and larger for loud voice
as compared to habitual and fast rates, and soft voice. The
one finding that went against expectations from the literature
on acoustic vowel space was the roughly equivalent or
slightly smaller articulatory vowel spaces at the slow rate, as
compared to the habitual condition; nevertheless, the articu-
latory spaces at slow rate were greater than those at the fast
rate and in the soft voice condition.
Variation induced by the speaking conditions and con-
texts allowed statistical analysis of within-speaker covaria-
tion of lingual and acoustic vowel spaces. Nine of the 13
speakers had a positive, significant Spearman correlation
between the two spaces for the tongue body sensor. For these
9 speakers, it seems reasonable to view variations in their
acoustic vowel spaces as reflecting variations in their lingual
working spaces for vowels. This finding is relevant to many
reports in the dysarthria literature in which variation in the
acoustic vowel space is interpreted as reflecting varying
speech motor capabilities. For example, individual subject
analyses have shown acoustic vowel spaces to increase with
recovery from head injury (Ziegler and von Cramon, 1983)
and as a result of speech therapy in persons with dysarthria
following stroke (Mahler and Ramig, 2012) or with a variety
of diseases associated with dysarthria (Wenke et al., 2010).
An argument has also been made that in Parkinson’s disease
the size of the acoustic vowel space can be used to track
deterioration of speech production skills over time, although
this conclusion is based solely on group data (Skodda et al.,
2012). In the first three cases, wherein expansions and com-
pressions of the vowel space are reported speaker by speaker
and issues such as vocal tract size, dialect, and so forth are
strictly controlled by the analysis unit (that is, the speaker),
the current results suggest that variation in size of the
Lee et al. 435
acoustic vowel space may reflect systematic variation in lin-
gual behaviors.
On the other hand, the potential error in within-speaker
inferences cannot be ignored. Several factors may contrib-
ute to these inferential errors. First, the fact that different
vocal tract configurations can yield the same set of resonant
frequencies may result in variance in the position data that
is not mapped onto the formant frequencies. The point-
parameterized data for tongue positions used in the current
data and the majority of relevant literature reviewed above
may not capture this partition of the variance. Second, the
extent to which a speaker uses lip rounding/spreading for
the differentiation of the corner vowels, and the critical or
non-critical role of lip rounding in a vowel system may
weaken the inference. McGowan and Berger (2009), how-
ever, showed for speakers of American English a minimal
influence of lip position on kinematic-to-formant frequency
mapping. Third, variation in the way the cross-section of
the pharynx is modified over time may introduce uncer-
tainty to the acoustic-to-articulatory inference, though
Whalen et al. (1999) argued that much of the variance in
pharyngeal width for vowels can be explained by tongue
positions substantially forward to the pharynx (and presum-
ably by the point parameterization of those more forward
positions).
The rank-order, intra-speaker correlation data in Table
IV indicate that an interpretation of lingual vowel space
from acoustic vowel space is further complicated by varia-
tion in the strength of the covariation across speakers and
tongue location. In the current data set, the tongue body sen-
sor showed the most consistent, significant covariation
between the lingual and acoustic vowel spaces. Nine of the
13 speakers had significant correlations for the tongue body,
ranging from 0.636 to 0.939. Of the four speakers who did
not have a significant correlation for the tongue body, three
did not have a significant correlation for any of the tongue
sensors. For these latter speakers, it seems safe to conclude
that variation in the acoustic vowel space does not provide
good information about underlying variation in tongue posi-
tion. At the current time, unfortunately, it is not possible to
identify a priori those speakers for whom the acoustic-to-
articulatory inference is likely to be reasonable. In post hoc
analyses we explored the possibility that speakers with the
least lingual position variation across speaking conditions or
contexts, or speakers with exceptionally small lingual work-
ing spaces in the habitual condition, were those for whom
the correlations between the acoustic and position data were
not significant; the analysis did not support these possibil-
ities. Future work should focus on factors such as vocal tract
morphology, dialect, gender, and so forth that may be deter-
miners of significant covariation between acoustic and
lingual vowel spaces.
Articulatory variation across speakers for a given
vowel of English, even with control over dialect, is well
known (Harshman et al., 1977; Johnson et al., 1993).
When solutions for a forward model from articulatory
behavior to acoustic output are explored, across-speaker
variation is prominent. For example, McGowan and Berger
(2009) performed a very dense-sampling analysis of the
436 J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 139 (1), January 2016
forward relationship between tongue point positions and
vowel formant frequencies for each of four speakers.
McGowan and Berger’s analysis revealed some similarities
across speakers for articulatory-to-formant frequency map-
pings, but also non-trivial, speaker-to-speaker variation
reminiscent of the findings of Harshman et al. (1977) and
Johnson et al. (1993) in which different speakers (N ¼ 5 in
these two studies) employed different magnitudes or even
styles of articulatory gestures for the same vowels. One
source of across-speaker variation in the forward mappings
is almost certainly due to speaker-to-speaker variation in
vocal tract morphology, which has been linked to variation
in tongue behavior for the production of certain vowels
(Fuchs et al., 2008).
McGowan and Berger (2009) and Wang et al. (2013)
studied the mapping between kinematic and acoustic vocalic
data by analyzing their covariations across time, albeit in
somewhat different ways. McGowan and Berger (2009) per-
formed a very dense sampling of x-y coordinates of tongue
points and the lips together with formant frequencies meas-
ured at each position sampling point, whereas Wang et al.
(2013) mapped a “shape” derived from tongue and lip data
to a single estimate of vowel formant frequencies. In con-
trast, the current study used a mapping based on measure-
ments derived from a single point-in-time, to be consistent
with acoustic measures of vowel space that have attained a
prominent role in the literature on acoustic measures of
speech motor control integrity. The current study, including
aspects of the methods and results, is similar to Mefferd and
Green (2010) in showing for a majority of healthy speakers a
systematic relationship between lingual position and formant
frequency measures; this conclusion is also broadly consist-
ent with the results of McGowan and Berger (2009) and
Wang et al. (2013). Taken together, the results of Mefferd
and Green (2010) and of the current study, as well as the
work of McGowan and Berger (2009), Wang et al. (2013),
and recent work by Mefferd (2015) in speakers with dysarth-
ria, suggest a reasonable starting point of using acoustic
measures to draw some inferences concerning lingual behav-
ior for vocalics, and possibly as an index of speech motor
control integrity. The difference between the current study
and the previous ones is the explicit comparison of the
acoustically and kinematically derived working spaces for
corner vowels. Depending on how the current results are
viewed, the inference of lingual working space from acoustic
vowel spaces, and by extension the use of vowel space areas
as estimates of speech motor control integrity, is either partly
supported or deeply flawed.
Partial support for the inference is found in the weight
of statistical evidence showing positive relationships
between size of the acoustic vowel space and size of the lin-
gual kinematic vowel space. All but 3 of the 13 speakers
showed at least one significant correlation in the expected
direction. Moreover, this finding applies not only to the
/hVd/ versus /dVd/ comparison, but also across the tasks
which modified the size of the acoustic vowel space and typ-
ically were associated with similar changes in the kinematic
vowel space: tasks inducing smaller acoustic vowel spaces
tended to be associated with smaller kinematic vowel spaces.
Lee et al.
An additional observation worthy of note is the statistical
support for the goodness of the inference from acoustic to
kinematic vowel space, for the majority of speakers, even in
the absence of other potentially relevant position data, such
as from the lips, pharynx, and even the parasagittal configu-
ration of the vocal tract. Even for a substantially underpara-
meterized analysis, both in the type of measures obtained
and the single-point-in-time sampling, the hypothesized
results were obtained in most cases. The more important
finding of the present study, however, may be the failure to
confirm statistically significant covariation between acousti-
cally and kinematically derived vowel spaces for three of
the speakers. Some preliminary, post hoc analyses per-
formed in these speakers failed to identify possible reasons
for these findings. Possibly these three speakers are precisely
the ones for whom data on lip positions, palatal morphology,
and pharyngeal dimensions are critical in understanding the
mapping from acoustic to kinematic vowel spaces. The
problem is that at the current time there is no way to know
which speakers are those for whom the acoustic-to-kine-
matic vowel space inference is reasonable. For a given
speaker, therefore, the current data suggest that an inference
of articulatory vowel space from acoustic data alone may be
risky.
B. Acoustic and lingual vowel spaces: Inter-speaker
findings versus intra-speaker findings
Computed across speakers, correlations between size
of the acoustic and articulatory vowel spaces (Table I)
were much weaker than within-speaker correlations (Table
IV). Although many across-speaker correlations were stat-
istically significant, they reflected a substantial amount of
unexplained variance (slightly more than 65%, in the best
case) between the two types of vowel space. The relative
weakness of the inter-speaker, compared to the intra-
speaker correlations is perhaps not surprising when consid-
ering all the “noise variables” in an inter-speaker analysis.
These include variations in vocal tract size, vocal tract
morphology, speaker to speaker variations in task produc-
tion (note in Table I the much lower correlations for the
non-habitual speaking tasks), and dialect variation when it
is not controlled (see summary of such factors in Johnson
et al., 1993).
An excellent example of the potential effect of varia-
tions in vocal tract morphology on inferences from acoustic
to lingual position vowel spaces is palatal shape. For vowel
production, the tongue is shaped to form specific constric-
tions. Because it is known that palatal morphology affects
lingual positions for vowel constrictions (Brunner et al.,
2009; Rudy and Yunusova, 2013), the relative weakness of
the inter-speaker correlations between acoustic and lingual
vowel spaces may be due, at least in part, to the absence of
data on palatal morphology differences among the current 13
speakers.
Nevertheless, the implication of the relatively weak cor-
relations in the inter-speaker analyses is that comparisons of
group acoustic vowel spaces, such as those across speaker
groups or treatments (Sapir et al., 2007) or conditions
J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 139 (1), January 2016
(Tjaden et al., 2013) are even more difficult to interpret in
articulatory terms as compared to variation of acoustic vowel
space within an individual.
C. The x and y coordinates and variations in F1 and F2
If the acoustic vowel space is a proxy for articulatory
capabilities, interpretation of acoustic data in terms of the
classical articulatory dimensions for vowels seems a sensi-
ble extension of the more general notion of “vowel work-
ing space.” In virtually every study of articulatory-to-
acoustic mappings for vowels, a two dimensional articula-
tory solution accounts for a very large portion of the var-
iance in formant frequency data. These two dimensions
include either the classical ones from speech acoustic
theory (Fant, 1960), wherein tongue height variation
accounts largely for variations in F1 and tongue advance-
ment for variations in F2 (three of four speakers in
McGowan and Berger, 2009; Wang et al., 2013) or a pair
of factors in which one (or both) incorporates the tongue
height dimension of the classical theory and the other is a
somewhat more complex version of the tongue advance-
ment/height dimensions (Harshman et al., 1977; Ladefoged
et al., 1978). As summarized by McGowan and Berger
(2009, pp. 2030–2031), the more complex mapping
between tongue advancement/height and variation in F2
and F1 can be explained within the tube-resonator laws of
Fant’s (1960) acoustic theory of vowel production. What is
clear from these studies is that two-dimensional articulatory
solutions account for a substantial amount of the variance
in F1 and F2; the immediate question is the degree to
which individual articulatory dimensions can be inferred
from single-formant measures.
The current data are consistent with a fairly straightfor-
ward relationship between tongue height (including jaw con-
tributions) and variation in F1. Data plotted in Fig. 4 and
reported in Table II show a tight inverse relationship
between the lingual y position and value of F1, as predicted
by the acoustic theory of vowel production. These fairly
strong correlations, which suggest approximately 65% of the
variance in F1 is explained by tongue point variation in the y
dimension, are consistent across the three sampled tongue
sensors. The across-vowel range of y values, roughly 25 mm
in Fig. 4, is consistent with the range of vertical values plot-
ted by McGowan and Berger (2009, their Fig. 3, p. 2019) for
x-ray microbeam data across a wide range of vowels, as well
as with the range of Euclidean distances between /i/ and /A/
reported by Mefferd and Green (2010). Collectively, the
results of the present study, and those of a few previous
investigations, point to an ability to infer vowel tongue
height, or perhaps more precisely openness of the vocal tract,
from the value of the first formant frequency. Correlations
between the x dimension of tongue position and F1 were
also statistically significant, but the largest coefficient, for
the tongue tip, explained only 19% of the variance in F1
(Table II).
The pattern of correlations for tongue positions and F2
was less clear than the case for F1. Correlations for the x and
y positions with F2 were roughly of the same magnitude,
Lee et al. 437
both accounting for about 40% of the variance between the related in a more complex way to openness and tongue
position and acoustic data (with the exception of the very advancement.
low correlation of F2-x at the tongue dorsum sensor). The
finding that F2-position correlations explain a smaller ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
amount of variance than F1-y correlations may not be sur- We thank Neil Szuminsky for assistance with equipment
prising, partially because F2 is particularly sensitive to varia- operational support and data collection. We thank Zora
tions in lip and pharyngeal sections of the vocal tract (Fant, McFarlane-Blake, Jamie Meta, and Taylor Baker Rogan for
1960), which were not parameterized in the current study. assistance with data collection and data analyses. Portions of
Of greater interest, perhaps, are the apparently equivalent these data were presented at the 164th Meeting of the Acoustical
effects of x and y position variation on F2. In theory, tongue Society of America, Kansas City, MO and 2013 American
position variation in the x dimension, conceptually aligned Speech-Language-Hearing Convention, Chicago, IL. The
with tongue advancement/retraction, might be expected to authors thank one of the reviewers for raising the possibility that
be more strongly associated with F2 than variations in the y the inter-speaker correlations between acoustic and kinematic
dimension. From the perspective of Fant’s tube theory of vowel spaces might be improved by additional scaling of the
articulatory-to-acoustic mappings, however, the effects of kinematic data, specifically by dividing by individual speaker,
tongue height and advancement on F2 interact due to the kinematic vowel-space area.
relationship of constriction location and size to the pressure
(or velocity) distribution for the second resonant mode of a
tube closed at one end. Examination of Fant’s nomogram APPENDIX A
with the lip section removed (Fant, 1960, p. 84) shows the Please see Table V for additional results.
expected increase in F2 with position of the major vowel
constriction advancing toward the lip end of the model—the TABLE V. Pearson r-values between the first formant frequency (F1) and
so-called tongue advancement rule—but also shows the tongue x-y coordinates of tongue tip, body and dorsum within each speaker
magnitude to depend dramatically on the area of the major (Intra-speaker level analyses). The sample size (n) ranged between 203 and
210 within each speaker [(4 corner vowels  5 speaking styles  2 conso-
constriction (that is, the height of the tongue). The corre- nant environments  3 repetitions) þ (6 other monophthongs  5 speaking
sponding curves for F1 show only small effects of constric- styles  3 repetitions)]. The bolded values are the highest r-value in the
tion location, but a fairly strong effect for constriction area, expected direction across the three tongue regions examined in each
even when the areas are restricted to three fairly tight con- speaker. These values are used in text in Sec. III C 1.
strictions. Fant’s theoretical formulations are supported by Formant Speaker Tongue tip x Tongue body x Tongue dorsum x
the current correlational analyses: whereas variations in F1
a a
provide reasonably good information on tongue height, var- F1 P1 0.341 0.458 0.271a
iations in F2 reflect a more composite effect of tongue height P2 0.534a 0.449a 0.369a
P3 0.387a 0.403a 0.312a
and advancement.
P4 0.298a 0.199a 0.454a
P5 0.569a 0.525a 0.230a
D. Limitations and conclusions of the current study P6 0.101 0.325a 0.141b
P7 0.737a 0.672a 0.683a
A major conclusion of this study is that inferences to the
P8 0.585a 0.634a 0.720a
size of the lingual articulatory space from acoustic vowel P9 0.553a 0.679a 0.640a
space measures seem at first glance to be reasonable in a ma- P10 0.662a 0.683a 0.656a
jority of the speakers studied, but there is no way, at least at P11 0.388a 0.354a 0.328a
the current time, to identify those speakers for whom the in- P12 0.053 0.061 0.196a
ference is not reasonable. More specifically, the inferences P13 0.593a 0.542a 0.319a
are clearly more consistent for within-speaker variation in Formant Speaker Tongue tip y Tongue body y Tongue dorsum y
the acoustic vowel space as compared to across-speaker vari-
ation, but the uncertainty mentioned above is still present for F1 P1 0.830a 0.847a 0.894a
P2 0.755a 0.825a 0.810a
intra-speaker inferences such as might be made across time
P3 0.775a 0.861a 0.833a
to index progress due to speech therapy or recovery of
P4 0.816a 0.903a 0.841a
impaired speech skills from effects of a stroke or head P5 0.703a 0.827a 0.832a
injury. Additional work is required to determine the ultimate P6 0.901a 0.849a 0.858a
use of acoustic vowel space measures in understanding P7 0.872a 0.855a 0.904a
speech motor control limitations among persons with speech P8 0.850a 0.871a 0.904a
disorders. Variables contributing to the uncertainty have P9 0.765a 0.898a 0.904a
been discussed above, and include the underparameterization P10 0.845a 0.862a 0.870a
of the articulatory data in the current study, and even possi- P11 0.791a 0.790a 0.809a
P12 0.774a 0.826a 0.854a
bly of the acoustic data. Data from the current study on the
P13 0.776a 0.808a 0.843a
inference from formant frequencies to specific characteristics
of vowel production suggest that F1 provides relatively good a
p-value < 0.01
b
information on relative openness of the tract, whereas F2 is p-value < 0.05.

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