Articulatory prosody (ArtPros) describes syllable prominence patterns of spoken utterances in terms of mandible patterns of varying amounts of mandible lowering. The underlying premise, inspired by the prosodic/phonologic input to the Fujimura C/D model (Fujimura 2002), is that syllable prominence patterns are language-specific, based on the underlying metrical structure/organization of syllables of that language. Infants learn these patterns as they watch their caretakers’ mouths/mandibles open and shut at the same time listening to amplitude/duration/formant modulations of a string of syllables (see e.g. Gosami 2019). The prominence patterns of the firstly acquired language(s) are often carried over as they learn a new language (see e.g. Erickson and Niebuhr 2023).

1. The amount of jaw (mandible) lowering for each syllable corresponds to the prominence value of that syllable. It doesn’t matter if it is a high or low vowel, we see the same pattern.
2. The prominence patterns of a language, i.e., mandible lowering patterns, given vowel height normalization, match the metrical organization of that language, i.e., the arrangement of strong-weak/weak-strong syllables within phrases/utterances.
3. These patterns are learned by infants and tend to be transferred to a later-learned second language (L2).
4. Jaw dancing training improves L2 prosody, leading to improved communication skills.

Data here are based on acoustic and articulatory recordings using electromagneticarticulography (EMA) (Kaburagi and Honda 1997) and MARRYS (Gudmundsson et al. 2024).

These four languages, French, Japanese, Mandarin, and BP are similar in that increased mandible lowering occurs on the phrase final stressed/full syllable. French, Japanese and Mandarin, in addition, show the largest mandible lowering on the utterance final full syllable, with optional increased mandible lowering on phrase/utterance initial syllable. Figure 1 shows mandible lowering patterns collected with EMA for French, Japanese and Mandarin; patterns for BP, collected with the MARRYS helmet, are reported in Erickson et al. (2024).

English prominence patterns reflect the metrical organization of the language, which is different from that of the above-mentioned languages. English has n-ary levels of syllable prominence (see e.g., Liberman and Prince 1977). Within a unit (foot, phrase, utterance), one syllable has larger prominence than the others, and it is cumulative, such that the phrasal stress has larger prominence than the foot stress, and utterance nuclear stress syllable has the largest amount of prominence in the utterance. Mandible lowering patterns reflect this metrical hierarchy, as shown in Figure 2. In addition, phrasing information (i.e. phrase breaks) is conveyed by the mandible, see e.g. for Erickson et al. (2015).

Focus/contrastive emphasis increases mandible lowering on the focused/emphasized syllable/word, a phenomena seen cross-linguistically (e.g. Erickson and Niehbuhr 2023). An interesting consequence, at least for English, is that emphasis on a normally produced weak syllable (w) will result in increasing the mandible lowering, thus changing the syllable to a strong syllable (s), and consequently, reducing the mandible lowering on the next syllable, thus changing the utterance prominence pattern (i.e., metrical structure) of the utterance, i.e., The fat cat sat with Matt (ws ws)=>The fat cat sat with Matt (sw ws), where bold letters indicate s-syllables, and non-bold indicates w-syllables (Svensson Lundmark et al. 2023).

Preliminary work (Wilson et al. 2020) indicates that by focusing on jaw lowering patterns (“Jaw dancing training”) learners of a second language produce more L2-type prominence patterns. More work is needed along these lines.

ArtPros is a relatively new data-driven approach to understanding prominence patterns of spoken utterances, and as such, is open for testing. Inspired by the Fujimura C/D model, it does not preclude information about the laryngeal component of prosody, i.e., F0 or voice quality, rather purports that prominence patterns of “syllable magnitude” form the basic structure of language rhythm, with F0/voice quality as separate but complementary components. ArtPros focuses on mandible movement patterns to understand prominence patterns; it follows that as the mandible moves lower to articulate increased prominence, i.e., increased syllable magnitude, the articulatory constrictions for producing the initial consonants, i.e., syllable onset constrictions, must increase in magnitude. Work by Svensson Lundmark (2024) explores this aspect of prominence, hypothesizing that increased magnitude of articulation of consonantal constrictions triggers increased mandible lowering. Whether increased syllable magnitude (i.e., increased mandible lowering) results in increased constriction magnitude of consonantal articulators or the other way around is a data-driven research question. More about Articulatory Prosody and the various supporting experiments can be found in Erickson and Niebuhr (2023).

With the advent of an easier way to collect mandible movement data using the MARRYS hat (see e.g., Gudmundsson et al. 2024), the hypotheses described here can be tested rather easily, e.g., jaw dancing training improves L2 prosody and communication. Also needed is a method to normalize across vowel heights to see if indeed the metrical organization of an utterance can be assessed from mandible movement patterns. And, also needed is a more affordable approach in terms of time and money for examining the articulatory coordination of constrictions for consonants, tongue movement for vowels, and mandible opening and closing movements for syllables.

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Erickson, D., Suemitsu, A., Shibuya, Y., and Tiede, M. (2012) Metrical structure and production of English rhythm. Phonetica.69, 180–190.

Erickson, D., Kim, J., Kawahara, S., Wilson, I., Menezes, C.,Suemitsu, A., and Moore, J. (2015) Bridging articulation and perception: The C/D model and contrastive emphasis. International Congress of Phonetic Sciences 2015.

Erickson, D. and Niebuhr, O. (2023) Articulation of prosody and rhythm: Some possible applications to language teaching,  Studies in Laboratory Phonology. Language Science Press (langsci-press.org), pp.1-45. DOI: 10.2478/9788366675728-001.

Erickson, D., Svensson Lundmark, M., & Huang, T. (in press) Jaw opening patterns and their correspondence with syllable stress patterns. In Lars Meyer & Antje Strauss (Eds.) Rhythms of Speech and Language. Chapter 2.3. Cambridge University Press.

Erickson, D., Rilliard, A., Svensson Lundmark, M., Rebollo Couto, L., Silva, A., de Moraes, J., Niebuhr, O. (2024) Collecting Mandible Movement in Brazilian Portuguese . Interspeech 2024.

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Gudmundsson, V.F., Gönczi, K.M., Svensson Lundmark, M., Erickson, D., & Niebuhr, O. (2024). The MARRYS helmet: A new device for researching and training “jaw dancing”. Proc. 25^th Interspeech Conference, Kos, Greece, 1-5.

Kaburagi, T. and Honda, M. (1997). Calibration methods ofvoltage-to-distance function for an electromagnetic articulometer (EMA) system. J. acoust. Soc. Am., 111, 1414–1421.

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