How can the control of the vocal tract limit the speaker's capability to produce the ultimate perceptive objectives of speech? 1063

Abstract In this paper an extension of the lip-tube experiment proposedby Savariaux et al. (1990) is presented and analyzed. Thequestion underlying the design of this experiment is whetherspeakers are able to produce an [u] with a large lip opening.Nine native speakers of French repeated the originalexperiment, and then were asked to produce the vowel [u]starting from [o] vocal tract configuration. It was shown thatmore subjects achieved the compensation when they shiftedtheir articulation from [o] to [u]. The issue of a possibleconstraint imposed by a learned standard articulatory pattern isdiscussed in relation with the notion of the internalrepresentation of the articulatory-to-acoustic relations.Proposals in favor of a standard pattern for [u] that would bevelopalatal rather than velopharyngeal are discussed. 1. Introduction The respective weight of the acoustic/auditory and articulatorydomains in the definition of speech production objectives isstill a matter of large debate. To contribute to the discussion,we present results of an experiment that was designed as anextension of the original lip-tube experiment proposed bySavariaux et al. (1995a).