Measurements on the movement of the lower jaw in speech

This report concerns some preliminary measurements on the movement of the lower jaw in speech. Such measurements may be interesting for several reasons. One of these is that they more easily than measurements on the movements of other articulators may give some insight into the effect of stress, duration and position on articulator movement. Another reason is that the study of jaw movement together with other aspects of articulation may provide information on articulatory coordination. The effect of stress, duration and position on the extent of jaw movement has been investigated by studying jaw movement in the speaking of nonsense words with the structure /ta:ta:ta:t/ and /tatatat/. These two phoneme sequences have been spoken as nonsense words with the stress on the first, second or third syllable. Each of the resulting 6 variations has been spoken 10 times by both authors. Furthermore, one aspect of articulatory coordination has been studied, viz. the temporal relation between the start of the jaw opening movement and the vowel onset in intervocalic consonants and consonant clusters by recording jaw movement in nonsense words of the structure /daC&/, where /C/ stands for one of the following consonants or consonant clusters: /d, t, s, st, str, nst, nstr/ . All forms were spoken 10 times each by both authors.