“Quasiphysiological” tongue model
Joseph S. Perkell · The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 1974
A quasiphysiological dynamic model of the tongue has been devised and implemented in a discrete simulation. The model changes shape only in the saggital plane. Its thickness in the dimension perpendicular to this plane is fixed; consequently, areas in the midsaggital plane correspond to volumes of the tongue. The model consists of 16 mass-bearing fleshpoints, which are connected to one another and to bony attachments by 38 active muscle elements and 47 passive connective-tissue elements. A simple submodel accounts for the behavior of each element type, and the muscle model develops tension in response to an input stimulation. The tongue muscles are represented by anatomical groupings of these tension-developing elements which are arranged to enclose 14 quadrilateral areas. These “volumes” have limited compressibility to allow for the transmission of compression forces and conservation of volume. In addition to tensile and volume-conserving forces, sliding-friction and hard-structure impenetrability forces act on the fleshpoints in the model to determine their movement. The model's behavior is compared with EMG and cineradiographic data, and it will become a component of an overall articulatory model which is intended to guide experimentation and evaluation of data on the physical and physiological properties of the vocal tract. [Research supported by an NIH grant.]