Air Flow Rate and Articulatory Movement During Speech

Abstract

Various procedures have been applied to the research of speech production. These methods may be classified into two general categories: a) studies of articulatory movements, by techniques such as direct observation (3), electromyography (6), and roentgenography (7, 15); and b) studies of phonated sounds, by techniques such as an ar-ticulatory test (4, 19), sound spectrography (5), and measurements of intraoral pressure and air flow (1,18).-Articulatory patterns, recognition of sounds, and physical characteristics of escaped air during speech (such asflow rate, volume, and pressure) are closely related (11). Cinefluorography has made observations of articulatory patterns easy, but it is still difiicult to measure physical characteristics of relatively minute quantities of air emerging orally or nasally. The criteria for the selection of instrumentation for measuring introaral pressure and air flow during speech have been discussed by Hardy (8). In 1965, Lubker and Moll developed electronic equipment to measure oral and nasal air flow rates and they assessed the relationship between these measurements and articulatory positions observed simultaneously by cinefluorography (10). t I The purpose of this study'is to develop comparable equipment for making simultaneous observations of air flow rates and articulatory movements and to present a preliminary report concerning the relation— ships between these two kinds of measurements. Procedures SUBJECTS. Five postoperative cleft palate patients and five normal subjects (two males and three females in each group) were selected. The mean ages were 22 years and 8 months for the cleft palate group and 23 years and 4 months for the control group. In the cleft palate group, the mean duration after the final palatal operation was 4 years and 7 months. The results of articulatory tests indicated that three had good articulation, one had a moderate amount of errors, and that one had bad articulation.