Control of rate and duration of speech movements

A computerized pulsed-ultrasound system was used to monitor tongue dorsum movements during the production of consonant-vowel sequences in which speech rate, vowel, and consonant were varied. The kinematics of tongue movement were analyzed by measuring the lowering gesture of the tongue to give estimates of movement amplitude, duration, and maximum velocity. All three subjects in the study showed reliable correlations between the amplitude of the tongue dorsum movement and its maximum velocity. Further, the ratio of the maximum velocity to the extent of the gesture, a kinematic indicator of articulator stiffness, was found to vary inversely with the duration of the movement. This relationship held both within individual conditions and across all conditions in the study such that a single function was able to accommodate a large proportion of the variance due to changes in movement duration. As similar findings have been obtained both for abduction and adduction gestures of the vocal folds and for rapid voluntary limb movements, the data suggest that a wide range of changes in the duration of individual movements might all have a similar origin. The control of movement rate and duration through the specification of biomechanical characteristics of speech articulators is discussed.