Lips-Jaw and Tongue-Jaw Articulatory Tradeoff in DYNARTmo

TL;DR

This paper presents DYNARTmo, a simplified dynamic articulatory model that simulates realistic lip, jaw, and tongue coordination patterns, capturing key articulatory tradeoffs and synergies in speech production.

Contribution

It introduces a first-order task-space gesture approach within DYNARTmo to model articulatory tradeoffs, demonstrating realistic movement patterns without complex biomechanics.

Findings

Reproduces empirically observed articulatory patterns

Captures tongue-jaw and lip-jaw coordination

Shows saturation effects in labial constrictions

Abstract

This paper investigates how the dynamic articulatory model DYNARTmo accounts for articulatory tradeoffs between primary and secondary articulators, with a focus on lips-jaw and tongue-jaw coordination. While DYNARTmo does not implement full task-dynamic second-order biomechanics, it adopts first-order task-space gesture specifications comparable to those used in articulatory phonology and integrates a simplified mechanism for distributing articulatory effort across multiple articulators. We first outline the conceptual relationship between task dynamics and DYNARTmo, emphasizing the distinction between high-level task-space trajectories and their low-level articulatory execution. We then present simulation results for a set of CV syllables that illustrate how jaw displacement varies as a function of both place of articulation (labial, apical, dorsal) and vowel context (/a/, /i/, /u/). The model reproduces empirically attested patterns of articulatory synergy, including jaw-supported apical closures, lower-lip elevation in bilabial stops, tongue-jaw co-movement, and saturation effects in labial constrictions. These results demonstrate that even with computationally simplified assumptions, DYNARTmo can generate realistic spatio-temporal movement patterns that capture key aspects of articulatory tradeoff and synergy across a range of consonant-vowel combinations.