“Since phonemics begins with a highly sophisticated symbolic representation of the speech event, and not with a direct observation of the physical phenomenon, there have been some linguists who have argued that the physical phenomenon is of no interest for phonemics. I shall show that this disregard for the physical facts lead to an uninteresting and trivial solution of all phonemic problems. […] [In trying to understand] how human beings communicate by means of language, it is impossible for us to discount physical considerations, the facts of physics and physiology.” (Halle, 1954).

     This approach was the foundation of the ‘substance-based’ conception of phonology illustrated by two pioneering investigations: Liljencrants & Lindblom (1972) and Stevens (1972), who proposed to explain the structure of the world’s vowel systems by considering physical facts either in the perceptual domain (The Maximal Dispersion Theory of Liljencrants & Lindblom) or in the relations between the articulatory and the auditory domains (the Quantal Theory of Speech by Stevens). These suggestions were followed by many others in the same vein, such as the concept for the economy of gestures to explain the variability in speech proposed by Lindblom (1983), the Dispersion-Focalization Theory of Schwartz et al. (1997) for a more accurate prediction of the world’s vowel systems, or the Frame-Content Theory proposed by MacNeillage (1998) to understand the ontogenetic emergence of language during babbling.

     Our research project is in line with these studies, and will focus on the possible interaction between linguistic factors and the physiological and physical properties of the speech production apparatus. Its specificity arises from the fact that during the past years our two research teams (at ZAS and at the GIPSA-lab, ICP in Grenoble) have simultaneously developed sophisticated models of the peripheral speech production system and its control and have acquired broad competencies in the acquisition of articulatory, aerodynamic and acoustic data of speech production. This created a very powerful framework to set up an efficient methodology in order to quantitatively assess the potential impact of physics and physiology on the characteristics of articulatory and acoustic speech signals. During these next 4 years we plan to develop further our models, and to acquire physiological data to contrast simulations and human data along two main directions: (1) the role of the dynamical interactions between tongue and jaw in the emergence of sub-lexical errors; (2) the potential influence of the interaction between linguistic units (phonemes, syllables, words), motor control planning strategies and dynamics of speech. It will be organized in three major working programs:

Working program 1 (WP1): Modelling tongue-jaw coordination in order to investigate selected sublexical speech errors (To what extent can these speech errors be explained by an disturbed coupling between tongue and jaw movement?).

Working program 2 (WP2): This working program will develop a motor control model (planning model) of the vocal tract articulators in the production of speech sequences, such as words or sequences of words, which integrates knowledge of the articulatory dynamics and use of short latency orosensory feedback.

Working program 3 (WP3): Using the planning model developed in WP2 we will investigate how linguistic planning units influence different kinds of coarticulation (anticipatory, carry-over) and which role physical and linguistic factors play in explaining prosodic phenomena.

     In all these investigations we will concentrate on German and French, but intent to record other languages which are interesting from a comparative view.

References:

Halle, M. (1954). Why and how do we study the sounds of speech? Georgetown University Monogrpah on Languages and Linguistics, 7, 73-83.

Liljencrants, J. & Lindblom, B.E.F. (1972). Numerical simulation of vowel quality systems: the role of perceptual contrast. Language., 48, 839-862.

Lindblom, B. (1983). Economy of speech gestures. In P. F. MacNeilage (ed.) The production of speech (pp. 217-245). New York: Springer.

MacNeilage, P. F. (1998). The frame/content theory of evolution of speech production. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 21, 499-511.

Schwartz, J.-L., Boë, L.-J., Vallée, N. & Abry, C. (1997). The Dispersion-Focalization Theory of vowel systems. J. Phonetics 25(3), 255-286.

Stevens, K.N. (1972). The quantal nature of speech: Evidence from articulatory-acoustic data. In P.B. Denes & J.R. Davis (eds.), Human Communication: A Unified View (pp.51-66). McGraw-Hill, New York.