Patterns of tongue movement

This study investigates tongue dynamics during speech production. The focus is on the deformation of the whole midsagittal edge of the tongue in transitions between lingual segments, rather than the movement of individual points of the tongue, which is the traditional focus of tongue dynamics research. Based on the analysis of 600 lingual transitions from an X-ray database of speech, it is shown that there are only two basic patterns of tongue movement, the pivot and the arch, which are independent of the starting and ending segments of a transition. It is then argued that the acoustic effect of these patterns of tongue deformation is to make the acoustic signal as articulatorily-transparent as possible.