Compensating for a Bite Block in /t / and /d / in French: Electropalatography Study

This paper deals with various movements of the tongue in perturbed speech. The activity of the jaw has been neutralized by mean of bite block in order to observe immediate compensatory tongue movement when the jaw was blocked. Electropalatography was used to monitor linguopalatal contact patterns in French /t / and /d /in normal and in bite-block speech. We thus observed how spatial and temporal changes of the tongue configurations palliate the immobilization of the mandible. Results showed that the presence of bite block immediatly modified the duration and the amplitude of the complete closure and effects of bite block were speaker dependent. Linguo-palatal contacts were made further forward than in normal speech, and reached a different articulatory target.