A qualitative dynamic analysis of reiterant speech production: phase portraits, kinematics, and dynamic modeling

The departure point of the present paper is our effort to characterize and understand the spatiotemporal structure of articulatory patterns in speech. To do so, we removed segmental variation as much as possible while retaining the spoken act's stress and prosodic structure. Subjects produced two sentences from the "rainbow passage" using reiterant speech in which normal syllables were replaced by /ba/ or /ma/. This task was performed at two self-selected rates, conversational and fast. Infrared LEDs were placed on the jaw and lips and monitored using a modified SELSPOT optical tracking system. As expected, when pauses marking major syntactic boundaries were removed, a high degree of rhythmicity within rate was observed, characterized by well-defined periodicities and small coefficients of variation. When articulatory gestures were examined geometrically on the phase plane, the trajectories revealed a scaling relation between a gesture's peak velocity and displacement. Further quantitative analysis of articulator movement as a function of stress and speaking rate was indicative of a language-modulated dynamical system with linear stiffness and equilibrium (or rest) position as key control parameters. Preliminary modeling was consonant with this dynamical perspective which, importantly, does not require that time per se be a controlled variable.