Effects of midline tongue piercing on spectral centroid frequencies of sibilants

Compensatory speech motor patterns occur in response to sensory changes in the vocal tract to facilitate natural sounding speech. The purpose of this project was to investigate speech compensation to midline lingual piercing. In the first experiment, two groups of female speakers (one with tongue piercing) produced two sets of speech samples. Tongue piercing barbells were kept in place as baseline for the first set, and removed for the second. No differences between subject groups were found for /s/ spectral centroid frequencies for the baseline set. A progressive change of /s/ centroid frequencies after barbell removal was observed, indicating rapid compensation to the lingual perturbation. In a second experiment speech samples were recorded from three subjects immediately prior to and following tongue piercing. Changes in centroid frequencies of /s/ and / / were dependent on the speaker. It is likely that physiological factors contributed to altered speech observed following piercing.