15th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS-15) Barcelona, Spain August 3-9, 2003

Consonant Articulation in Glossectomee Speech Evaluated by Dynamic MRI

Katalin Mady (1), Robert Sader (1), A. Beer (1), Philip Hoole (2), Angela Zimmermann (1), C. Hannig (1)

(1) Technische Universität München, Germany
(2) Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, Germany

Consonant production after glossectomy was investigated by means of acoustic and articulatory analysis. Articulatory movements in the midsagittal plane were recorded by real-time MRI (8 images/sec). With this method, near-natural production of sounds embedded in real words could be observed. Relying on measurements between the tongue and alveolar-palatal-velar-pharyngeal contours, a typical distance diagram for normal articulation was compared with the postoperative recordings. We found that two factors have to be fulfilled for a sufficient /s/-production: a narrow constriction in the dental-alveolar region and a restriction of the contact surface to this area. Absence of these characteristics was directly related to the lowering of the centre of gravity measurements of the spectra. If the constriction site was changed towards the palatal direction, the centre of gravity was lowered from ca. 3.5 kHz by ca. 1 kHz. If no narrow constriction was achieved at all, the centre of gravity was even lower.

Full Paper

Bibliographic reference.  Mady, Katalin / Sader, Robert / Beer, A. / Hoole, Philip / Zimmermann, Angela / Hannig, C. (2003): "Consonant articulation in glossectomee speech evaluated by dynamic MRI", In ICPhS-15, 3233-3236.