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1. Variation in compensatory strategies as a function of target constriction degree in post-glossectomy speech

   https://doi.org/10.1121/10.0009897  

   Hagedorn, Christina; Lu, Yijing; Toutios, Asterios; Sinha, Uttam; Goldstein, Louis; Narayanan, Shrikanth (April 2022, JASA Express Letters)

   Individuals who have undergone treatment for oral cancer oftentimes exhibit compensatory behavior in consonant production. This pilot study investigates whether compensatory mechanisms utilized in the production of speech sounds with a given target constriction location vary systematically depending on target manner of articulation. The data reveal that compensatory strategies used to produce target alveolar segments vary systematically as a function of target manner of articulation in subtle yet meaningful ways. When target constriction degree at a particular constriction location cannot be preserved, individuals may leverage their ability to finely modulate constriction degree at multiple constriction locations along the vocal tract. 

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2. How an aglossic speaker produces an alveolar-like percept without a functional tongue tip

   https://doi.org/10.1121/10.0001329  

   Toutios, Asterios; Xu, Melissa; Byrd, Dani; Goldstein, Louis; Narayanan, Shrikanth (June 2020, The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America)

   It has been previously observed [McMicken, Salles, Berg, Vento-Wilson, Rogers, Toutios, and Narayanan. (2017). J. Commun. Disorders, Deaf Stud. Hear. Aids 5(2), 1–6] using real-time magnetic resonance imaging that a speaker with severe congenital tongue hypoplasia (aglossia) had developed a compensatory articulatory strategy where she, in the absence of a functional tongue tip, produced a plosive consonant perceptually similar to /d/ using a bilabial constriction. The present paper provides an updated account of this strategy. It is suggested that the previously observed compensatory bilabial closing that occurs during this speaker's /d/ production is consistent with vocal tract shaping resulting from hyoid raising created with mylohyoid action, which may also be involved in typical /d/ production. Simulating this strategy in a dynamic articulatory synthesis experiment leads to the generation of /d/-like formant transitions. 

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3. Significance of Vocal Tract Geometrical Variations and Loudness on Airflow and Droplet Dispersion in a Two-Dimensional Representation of [F]

   https://doi.org/10.1115/FEDSM2021-65485  

   Mofakham, Amir A.; Helenbrook, Brian T.; Ahmed, Tanvir; Erath, Byron D.; Ferro, Andrea R.; Brown, Deborah M.; Ahmadi, Goodarz (October 2021, The American Society of Mechanical Engineers Fluids Engineering Division Summer Meeting)

   Abstract The significance of respiratory droplet transmission in spreading respiratory diseases such as COVID-19 has been identified by researchers. Although one cough or sneeze generates a large number of respiratory droplets, they are usually infrequent. In comparison, speaking and singing generate fewer droplets, but occur much more often, highlighting their potential as a vector for airborne transmission. However, the flow dynamics of speech and the transmission of speech droplets have not been fully investigated. To shed light on this topic, two-dimensional geometries of a vocal tract for a labiodental fricative [f] were generated based on real-time MRI of a subject during pronouncing [f]. In these models, two different curvatures were considered for the tip tongue shape and the lower lip to highlight the effects of the articulator geometries on transmission dynamics. The commercial ANSYS-Fluent CFD software was used to solve the complex expiratory speech airflow trajectories. Simultaneously, the discrete phase model of the software was used to track submicron and large size respiratory droplets exhaled during [f] utterance. The simulations were performed for high, normal, and low lung pressures to explore the influence of loud, normal, and soft utterances, respectively, on the airflow dynamics. The presented results demonstrate the variability of the airflow and droplet propagation as a function of the vocal tract geometrical characteristics and loudness. 

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4. Diverse Tongue Base Retraction Strategies Drive Bolus Propulsion during Mammalian Swallowing

   https://doi.org/10.1093/icb/icaf016  

   Li, Peishu; Sellers, Kaleb_C; Orsbon, Courtney_P; Laurence-Chasen, Jeffrey_D; Gumidyala, Riya; Yuan, Madison; Huerta, George; Lever, Teresa_E; Gidmark, Nicholas_J; Luo, Zhe-Xi; et al (April 2025, Integrative And Comparative Biology)

   Synopsis During swallowing, a diverse range of mammals—from opossums to humans—propel food boluses out of the oropharynx via tongue base retraction (TBR). The widespread distribution of TBR behavior implies an ancient evolutionary origin, but the biomechanical mechanisms of TBR remain poorly understood. The evolution of TBR behavior is further complicated by the diversity of hyoid and tongue anatomy across mammals: to what extent does hyolingual morphology shape TBR mechanism? Using biplanar videoradiography and the XROMM workflow, we collected high-resolution 3D kinematic data in opossums (Marsupialia), dogs (Placentalia), and macaques (Placentalia) to test hypotheses on the evolutionary conservation of TBR mechanisms. Despite differences in hyolingual morphology and resting hyoid position, both dogs and macaques drive TBR through hyoid movement: hyoid excursions reduce the oral volume and squeeze the tongue base posteriorly, analogous to a hydraulic pump displacing an incompressible fluid. In opossums, however, intrinsic lingual muscles deform the tongue base to initiate TBR, independent of hyoid movement and oral volume change. We suggest that multiple mechanisms are viable for the highly conserved TBR behavior across mammals, and the functional diversity of TBR mechanisms is decoupled from the morphological diversity of the hyolingual system. This decoupling may have facilitated the evolution of novel hyolingual phenotypes while avoiding trade-offs in swallowing performance. 

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5. Multimodal Approach for Assessing Neuromotor Coordination in Schizophrenia Using Convolutional Neural Networks

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3462244.3479967  

   Siriwardena, Yashish M.; Espy-Wilson, Carol; Kitchen, Chris; Kelly, Deanna L. (October 2021, Proceedings of the 2021 International Conference on Multimodal Interaction (ICMI ’21))

   This study investigates the speech articulatory coordination in schizophrenia subjects exhibiting strong positive symptoms (e.g. hallucinations and delusions), using two distinct channel-delay correlation methods. We show that the schizophrenic subjects with strong positive symptoms and who are markedly ill pose complex articulatory coordination pattern in facial and speech gestures than what is observed in healthy subjects. This distinction in speech coordination pattern is used to train a multimodal convolutional neural network (CNN) which uses video and audio data during speech to distinguish schizophrenic patients with strong positive symptoms from healthy subjects. We also show that the vocal tract variables (TVs) which correspond to place of articulation and glottal source outperform the Mel-frequency Cepstral Coefficients (MFCCs) when fused with Facial Action Units (FAUs) in the proposed multimodal network. For the clinical dataset we collected, our best performing multimodal network improves the mean F1 score for detecting schizophrenia by around 18% with respect to the full vocal tract coordination (FVTC) baseline method implemented with fusing FAUs and MFCCs. 

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