Rotation and translation of the jaw during speech

A two-dimensional rigid-body model of jaw movement was used to describe jaw opening and closing gestures for vowels and for bilabial and alveolar consonants. Jaw movements were decomposed into three components: (a) rotation about the terminal hinge axis, (b) the horizontal translation of that axis, and (c) the vertical translation of that axis. Data were collected for 3 subjects in two separate recording sessions. Multiple regression analysis was used to examine the relationships among the three jaw movement components. For 2 subjects, but not for the third, an interdependence between jaw rotation and the first principal component of jaw translation, horizontal translation, was observed. For these 2 subjects, the first degree of freedom of jaw movement corresponded to a combination of rotation and the first principal component of jaw translation. For the third subject, the first degree of freedom of jaw movement corresponded to rotation alone. The results of this study, like those of Westbury (1988), indicate that an accurate description of jaw movement during speech requires the recording of two points of jaw movement.