Kinematic event patterns in speech: Special problems

The view that each utterance is fundamentally a pattern of serially-ordered events underlies a group of well-known speech kinematic studies emphasizin g temporal coordination among articulators. Methodological problems that mi ght affect the validity and significance of conclusions from these studies are identified. Results from a new analysis of synchronous acoustic and fle shpoint-kinematic data, recorded from 53 normal young-adult speakers of Ame rican English, are then reported. The kinematic data represented speech-rel ated actions of the tongue blade and dorsum, both lips, and the mandible, d uring the test words special and problem, and were drawn from an existing X -ray microbeam speech production database. Distributions of event patterns across speakers revealed four main results: (1) different patterns for the two test words; (2) a comparable degree of cross-speaker agreement about re lative tongue and jaw movement timing, but marked disagreement about lip an d jaw movement timing, between test words; (3) highly distinctive movement patterns for some speakers; and, (4) a general conclusion that serial event order, alone, provides very limited understanding of movement patterns pro duced by individual speakers. By design, these results focus attention on m ethods of kinematic event pattern analyses, and the general value of such a nalyses for insights about speech production.