SKULL AND VOCAL TRACT GROWTH:FROM NEWBORN TO ADULT
Louis-Jean Boë1, Jean Granat2, Pierre Badin3, Denis Autesserre1, David Pochic4, Nassim Zga4, Nathalie Henrich5 & Lucie Ménard6
1ICP – Depart Speech and Cognition, GIPSA, CNRS, Université Stendhal, Grenoble; 2Muséum National Histoire Naturelle, CNRS, Paris, France; 3ICP – Depart Speech and Cognition, GIPSA, CNRS, INPG, Grenoble; 4École Nationale Supérieure d’Électronique, Grenoble, France; 5ICP – Depart Speech and Cognition, GIPSA, CNRS, Université Stendhal, Grenoble, France; 6Départ. Linguistique et Didactique des Langues, Univ. du Québec, Montréal, Canada
The objective of this work is twofold. First, a model of the vocal tract is positioned into the bony architecture of the male and female skulls from birth to adulthood. Second, vowel spaces are determined and vowel prototypes, for the cardinal vowels, are synthesized using a simulation of the laryngeal source. Results of this modeling study during ontogeny allow for a better understanding of speech acquisition processes in infants and vocal tract reconstruction of fossils’ Hominids.