Can the location of the vocal tract bending constrain individual vowel articulation? Evidence from biomechanical modelling.

Speakers of a given language vary with respect to their acoustics, articulation, and motor commands. This variation is driven by a variety of influences, such as emotional states, communicative interaction, and individual properties of the vocal tract. In this work we focus on the latter. First, we build speaker-specific biomechanical tongue models. Second, we discuss the impact of the relative position of the bending in the vocal tract on the basis of extensive simulations with two different models.