Jaw-Opening Patterns and Their Correspondence with Syllable Stress Patterns

A string of speech is a string of syllables, a series of varying amounts of jaw openings/closings. Neutralizing the vowel-intrinsic jaw opening indicates a pattern of jaw opening matching the utterance syllable prominence patterns. The hypothesis is that the jaw-opening patterns ensue from the metrical hierarchy of the language, such that for languages such as English, we see exponentially increasing jaw displacement on the metrically strong syllable within each foot, phrase, and utterance; for languages such as French, Chinese, and Japanese, we see increased jaw displacement at the end of each phrase, with the largest amount of jaw displacement at the end of the utterance. These language-specific jaw-displacement patterns tend to be carried over when learning a second language. Also explored in this chapter are segmental articulation interactions with jaw-displacement patterns, as well as the relationship between metrically motivated jaw displacement patterns and listeners’ perceptions of utterance prominence patterns.