Area Functions and Articulatory Modeling as a Tool for Investigating the Articulatory, Acoustic, and Perceptual Properties of Sounds Across Languages

The goal of this chapter is to illustrate the usefulness of articulatory modeling (AM) as a tool for exploring the realization of phonological contrasts. The potential of the method as a tool in phonology is illustrated by addressing some key aspects of French sounds. Because it is based on French, this paper gives a French point of view on the vocal tract (VT) as a contrast generator. This is by no means a fresh point of view, in the sense that it is based on the strict application of the well-established acoustic theory of speech production (Chiba and Kajiyama 1958; Fant 1960; Stevens 1998). Different languages contrast their phonemes by exploiting different acoustic possibilities of the VT; from infancy the ear is attuned to the native language’s system of contrasts, suggesting a language-specific warping of the perceptual space. For example, the analysis of French reveals the role of the third formant (F3) and of the relative amplitude of the formants, which are often considered negligible in speech perception. In two-formant vowel models, the approximation of the upper formants by a single formant (F2’) has shown the importance of F3 in the /y:/ /i:/ contrast in Swedish (Carlson et al. 1975; Fant 2004). F3 is also crucial in French, to the contrast between unrounded and rounded front vowels (/i/, y/; /e/, /œ/; /ø/, /e/), and the