An articulatory model of the tongue based on a statistical analysis

An articulatory model of the tongue composed of linear components was determined by a statistical analysis of tongue shapes and jaw-opening measured on lateral x-ray motion pictures. The sum of the four components describes adequately the tongue shapes observed during utterances of 12 French vowels in sentences and of pV1CV2 disyllables, where V1 V2 = [i,a,u] and C = [b,d,g]. These components represent the effect of the jaw articulator, of the tongue-body articulator, of the dorsal articulator, and of the apical articulator upon the tongue shape, respectively. The vowels plotted on the articulatory space, where the x axis corresponds to the tongue-body component and the y axis to the jaw component, form the vowel triangle. The model seems to explain, at least in part, the origin of articulatory “front-back” and “high-low” dimensions. We speculate that such model should be suitable for the description of the dynamics of the tongue, since that of the individual articulators may be governed by a relatively simple law.