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Maity, Ursa

University of British Columbia

The intricate and interdigitated musculature of the human tongue presents a formidable challenge in quantifying functional traits for lingual behaviors, notably in speech articulation. To advance speech research and address treatment strategies, a harmonized approach blending quantitative and qualitative analyses of muscle functions within specific tongue movements is essential. A novel biomechanical ”atlas” model, incorporating morphological features from a diverse range of speakers, has the potential to predict and analyze muscle behavior across distinct subject-specific speech kinematics. This work centers on a Finite Element Model (FEM) constructed from multi-subject atlas MRI data, capturing the biomechanical intricacies of tongue movements during speech tasks such as "a souk" and "a geese." The tongue atlas model is used to inversely predict the muscle activations of eight native English speakers. To illuminate articulation differences within the same consonant sound production in distinct vowel contexts, we perform a Wilcoxon signed-ranked difference test on the estimated muscle activation patterns for each speaker. Our findings reveal that nearly all muscles engaged in producing the same /s/ sound exhibit different activation patterns in "a souk" vs. "a geese" across all speakers. Furthermore, we temporally align the muscle activation patterns for each speaker using a dynamic time warp (DTW) function and define a similarity index to measure resemblances in the employed motor strategies. Our results suggest that some speakers are more likely to employ similar motor strategies when uttering words than others.

Text

2023-09-20

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/85975

Biomedical Engineering

University of British Columbia

UBCV

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/