Speaking Tongues Are Actively Braced

Abstract

Taken together, these results indicate that tongue bracing is both pervasive and active in running speech and essential in understanding tongue movement control.

Neonatal imitation in context: Sensorimotor development in the perinatal period

“…If we represent muscle activation space as a high-dimensional space where each muscle has a corresponding dimension whose value is that muscle's activation level, learning speech movements can be modeled as a search for points in this space that satisfy task-specific criteria relevant to the speech learner. The dimensionality and size of this space are large enough to pose significant problems for an unstructured search, even for a single speech movement in isolation: The sets of activations that result in a solution for a given task are few in number relative to all possible sets of activations (see Gick et al 2017), and muscle activation is difficult to predict due to the number of redundant solutions for a given task (Loeb 2012). Factors such as muscle contraction dynamics, tissue mechanics, tissue incompressibility, and tongue-palate contact also mean that task-level similarities do not necessarily imply similar activations.…”

“…"Swallowing" indicates lateral, back, and mid-contact, representing the end of the oral transport phase of swallowing, immediately after the tongue has moved the bolus into the hypopharynx. See Gick et al (2017) for a detailed description of a similar simulation with different analysis.…”

Single-Word Speech Intelligibility in Children and Adults With Down Syndrome

“…Low and high vowels may differ not only in sensory feedback but also in mechanical support from peripheral structures such as the molars, palate, and pharynx. The term bracing has been used to describe a lingual posture in speech wherein the tongue is in contact with a rigid vocaltract surface, such as the teeth or palate (Gick, Allen, Roewer-Després, & Stavness, 2017). The nature of the bracing differs with the articulatory features of vowels.…”

Simultaneous dual-plane, real-time magnetic resonance imaging of oral cavity movements in advanced trombone players

“…The subject represented in the coronal view depicted in Figure 4A shows a degree of tongue asymmetry, with the right side of the DTS higher than the left in the depicted, static position. Although we did not observe tongue asymmetries in all subjects, speech production research indicates that they occur quite commonly (25,26). Apart from these individual differences, the movement patterns depicted in Figure 4B were consistent across subjects.…”