Examining Acoustic and Kinematic Measures of Articulatory Working Space: Effects of Speech Intensity

The purpose of this study was to examine the effect of speech intensity on acoustic and kinematic vowel space measures and conduct a preliminary examination of the relationship between kinematic and acoustic vowel space metrics calculated from continuously sampled lingual marker and formant traces.

Young adult speakers produced 3 repetitions of 2 different sentences at 3 different loudness levels. Lingual kinematic and acoustic signals were collected and analyzed. Acoustic and kinematic variants of several vowel space metrics were calculated from the formant frequencies and the position of 2 lingual markers. Traditional metrics included triangular vowel space area and the vowel articulation index. Acoustic and kinematic variants of sentence-level metrics based on the articulatory-acoustic vowel space and the vowel space hull area were also calculated.

Both acoustic and kinematic variants of the sentence-level metrics significantly increased with an increase in loudness, whereas no statistically significant differences in traditional vowel-point metrics were observed for either the kinematic or acoustic variants across the 3 loudness conditions. In addition, moderate-to-strong relationships between the acoustic and kinematic variants of the sentence-level vowel space metrics were observed for the majority of participants.

These data suggest that both kinematic and acoustic vowel space metrics that reflect the dynamic contributions of both consonant and vowel segments are sensitive to within-speaker changes in articulation associated with manipulations of speech intensity.