Associations between tongue movement pattern consistency and formant movement pattern consistency in response to...

Area of Science:

• Speech motor control research
• Acoustic and kinematic analysis of speech

Background:

• Tongue movement consistency reflects speech motor control.
• Directly measuring tongue movements is challenging and expensive.
• Formant movements are a potential indirect measure of tongue behavior.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate if formant movements can indirectly estimate tongue movement pattern consistency.
• To assess the relationship between acoustic and kinematic measures of speech movement patterns.
• To evaluate the utility of formant analysis across different age groups and speech tasks.

Main Methods:

• Calculated kinematic and acoustic spatiotemporal indexes (STI) for tongue and formant movements.
• Analyzed data from young and older adults across six speech conditions.
• Correlated kinematic STI with acoustic STI to assess agreement.

Main Results:

• Strong associations between kinematic and acoustic STI were found across participants.
• Moderate to strong associations were observed for individual participants across tasks.
• Acoustic STI showed weaker associations with kinematic STI when tongue motor performance changes were minor.

Conclusions:

• Formant movement pattern consistency can serve as an indirect measure of speech motor control.
• Acoustic analysis offers a potentially cost-effective alternative to direct kinematic tracking.
• The effectiveness of acoustic STI depends on the required sensitivity for detecting motor control changes.