Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in

Creating and simulating a realistic physiological tongue model for speech production

  • Published:
Multimedia Tools and Applications Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

Simulation of the tongue has important applications in biomechanics, medical science, linguistics, and graphics. The accuracy of the geometry, intrinsic structure and dynamic simulation of tongue are crucial for these applications. In this paper, we build a 3D anatomically and biomechanically accurate tongue model. For ensuring anatomical accuracy, the tongue mesh model is constructed based on accurate medical data and an interactive muscle marking method for specifying the muscle geometry and fiber arrangement. For ensuring biomechanical accuracy, a nonlinear, quasi-incompressible, isotropic, hyperelastic constitutive model is applied for describing the tongue tissues. Particularly, tongue muscles are additionally endowed with an anisotropic constitutive model, which reflects the active and passive mechanical behavior of muscle fibers. The dynamic simulation results of tongue movements subjected to certain muscle activations are presented and validated with experimental data, indicating the suitability for visual speech synthesis.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Log in via an institution

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Institutional subscriptions

Fig. 1
Fig. 2
Fig. 3
Fig. 4
Fig. 5
Fig. 6
Fig. 7

Similar content being viewed by others

References

  1. Abd-El-Malek S (1939) Observations on the morphology of the human tongue. J Anat 73(2):201

  2. Ackerman MJ (1998) the visible human project. Proc IEEE 86(3):504–511

    Article  Google Scholar 

  3. Agur AMR, Dalley AF, Boileau JC (2012) Grant, Grant’s atlas of anatomy. Lippincott Williams & Wilkins

  4. Badin P, Bailly G, Revret L, Baciu M, Segebarth C, Savariaux C (2002) Three-dimensional linear ar-ticulatory modeling of tongue, lips and face, based on mri and video images. J Phon 30(3):533–553

    Article  Google Scholar 

  5. Baer T, Alfonso PJ, Honda K (1988) Electromyography of the tongue muscles during vowels in /gpvp/ environment. Ann Bull RILP 22:7–19

    Google Scholar 

  6. Bourdin X (2007) Comparison of tetrahedral and hexahedral meshes for organ finite element modeling: An application to kidney impact. Tech. Rep

  7. Cohen MM, Massaro DW (1993) Modeling coarticulation in synthetic visual speech. In: in Models and techniques in computer animation. Springer, pp. 139–156

  8. Dang J, Honda K (2001) A physiological model of a dynamic vocal tract for speech production. Acoust Sci Technol 22(6):415–425

    Article  Google Scholar 

  9. Dang J, Honda K (2004) Construction and control of a physiological articulatory model. J Acoust Soc Am 115(2):853–870

    Article  Google Scholar 

  10. Engwall O (2003) Combining mri, ema and epg measurements in a three-dimensional tongue model,. In: in Speech Communication, pp. 303–329

    Google Scholar 

  11. Gerard J-M, Wilhelms-Tricarico R, Perrier P, Payan Y (2006) A 3d dynamical biomechanical tongue model to study speech motor control. In: arXiv preprint physics/0606148

    Google Scholar 

  12. Feldman AG (1986) Once more on the equilibrium-point hypothesis ( λ model) for motor control. J Mot Behav 18(1):17–54

    Article  MathSciNet  Google Scholar 

  13. Fujita S, Dang J, Suzuki N, Honda K (2007) A computational tongue model and its clinical application. Oral Sci Int 4(2):97–109

    Article  Google Scholar 

  14. Fung YC (1993) Biomechanics: mechanical properties of living tissues

  15. Gerard J-M, Perrier P, Payan Y, et al. (2006) 3d biomechan-ical tongue modeling to study speech production,. In: Speech production: Models, phonetic processes, and techniques, pp. 85–102

    Google Scholar 

  16. Hiiemae KM, Palmer JB (2003) Tongue movements in feeding and speech. Crit Rev Oral Biol Med 14(6):413–429

    Article  Google Scholar 

  17. Hill AV (1938) The heat of shortening and the dynamic constants of muscle. Proc R Soc Lond Ser B Biol Sci 126(843):136–195

    Article  Google Scholar 

  18. Huxley AF (1974) Muscular contraction. J Physiol 243(1):1

    Article  MathSciNet  Google Scholar 

  19. King SA, parent RE (2001) a 3d parametric tongue model for animated speech. J Vis Comput Animat 12(3):107–115

    Article  MATH  Google Scholar 

  20. Kiritani S, Miyawaki K, Fujimura O, Miller JE (2005) Computational model of the tongue. J Acoust Soc Am 57(S1):S3–S3

    Article  Google Scholar 

  21. Lieber RL, Fridn J (2000) Functional and clinical significance of skeletal muscle architecture. Muscle Nerve 23:1647–1666

    Article  Google Scholar 

  22. MacNeilage PF, Sholes GN (1964) An electromyographic study of the tongue during vowel production,. J Speech Hear Res 7(3):229

    Google Scholar 

  23. Maurel W (1998) D Thalmann, Y Wu, and N Magnenat Thalmann. Springer, Biomechanical models for soft tissue simulation

    Google Scholar 

  24. Miyawaki K (1974) A study of the musculature of the human tongue. Annual bulletin of the research institute of logopedics and phoniatrics 8:23–50

    Google Scholar 

  25. Muller M (2007) Information Retrieval for Music and Motion. Springer, Berlin Heidelberg

    Book  Google Scholar 

  26. Pelachaud C, van Overveld CWAM, Seah C (1994) Modeling and animating the human tongue during speech production. In: in Com-puter Animation’94, Proceedings of IEEE, pp. 40–49

    Google Scholar 

  27. Perkell SJ (1974) A physiologically-oriented model of tongue activity in speech production

  28. Perrier P, Payan Y (2011) St ´ephanie Buchaillard, Mohammad Ali Nazari, and Matthieu Chabanas, “Biomechanical models to study speech,. Faits de Langues 37:155–171

    Google Scholar 

  29. Richard L Lieber, Skeletal muscle structure, function, and plasticity, Lippincott Williams & Wilkins, 2002.

    Google Scholar 

  30. Sanguineti V, Laboissiere R, Payan Y (1997) A control model of human tongue movements in speech. Biol Cybern 77(1):11–22

    Article  MATH  Google Scholar 

  31. Shewchuk JR (1998) Tetrahedral Mesh Generation by Delaunay Refinement. In: ACM Symposium on Computational Geometry, pp. 86–95

    Google Scholar 

  32. Sifakis E, Neverov I, Fedkiw R (2005) Automatic determination of facial muscle activations from sparse motion capture marker data,” in ACM Transactions on Graphics (TOG). ACM 24:417–425

    Article  Google Scholar 

  33. Sifakis E, Selle A, Robinson-Mosher A, Fedkiw R (2006) Simulating speech with a physics-based facial muscle model,” in Proceedings of the 2006 ACM SIGGRAPH/Eurographics symposium on Computer animation. Eurographics Association:261–270

  34. Simo JC, Taylor RL (1991) Quasi-incompressible finite elasticity in principal stretches. continuum basis and numerical algorithms. Comput Methods Appl Mech Eng 85(3):273–310

    Article  MathSciNet  MATH  Google Scholar 

  35. Takemoto H (2001) Morphological analyses of the human tongue mus-culature for three-dimensional modeling. J Speech Lang Hear Res 44(1):95–107

    Article  Google Scholar 

  36. Tang CY, Zhang G, Tsui CP (2009) A 3d skeletal muscle model coupled with active contraction of muscle fibres and hyperelastic behaviour. J Biomech 42(7):865–872

    Article  Google Scholar 

  37. Teran J, Sifakis E, Blemker SS, Ng-Thow-Hing V, Lau C, Fedkiw R (2005) Creating and simulating skeletal muscle from the visible human data set. Visualization and Computer Graphics, IEEE Transactions on 11(3):317–328

    Article  Google Scholar 

  38. Vogt F, Lloyd J, Buchaillard S, Perrier P, Chabanas M, Payan Y, Fels S, et al. (2006) An efficient biomechanical tongue model for speech research. In: in Proceedings of the 7th International Seminar on Speech Production., pp. 51–58

    Google Scholar 

  39. Weiss JA, Maker BN, Govindjee S (1996) Finite element implementation of incompressible, transversely isotropic hyper-elasticity. Comput Methods Appl Mech Eng 135(1):107–128

    Article  MATH  Google Scholar 

  40. Wilhelms-Tricarico R (1995) Physiological modeling of speech produc-tion: Methods for modeling soft-tissue articulators. J Acoust Soc Am 97(5):3085–3098

    Article  Google Scholar 

  41. Yaseen K, Pelteret J-PV, Reddy BD (2013) The biomechanics of the human tongue. International journal for numerical methods in biomedical engineering 29(4):492–514

    Article  MathSciNet  Google Scholar 

  42. Yu J, Li A, Hu F, Fang Q, Jiang C, Li X, Yang J, Wang Z-f (2013) Data-driven 3d visual pronunciation of chinese ipa for language learning,. In: in Oriental COCOSDA held jointly with 2013 Conference on Asian Spoken Language Research and Evaluation (O-COCOSDA/CASLRE), 2013 International Conference IEEE, pp. 1–6

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  43. Zajac FE (1988) Muscle and tendon: properties, models, scaling, and application to biomechanics and motor control. Crit Rev Biomed Eng 17(4):359–411

    Google Scholar 

Download references

Acknowledgments

This work is supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No.61572450 and No.61303150), the Open Project Program of the State KeyLab of CAD&CG, Zhejiang University (No. A1501), the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (WK2350000002), the Open Funding Project of State Key Laboratory of Virtual Reality Technology and Systems, Beihang University (No. BUAA-VR-16KF-12).

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei, China

    Jun Yu, Chen Jiang & Zengfu Wang

Authors
  1. Jun Yu
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  2. Chen Jiang
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  3. Zengfu Wang
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Jun Yu.

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this article

Yu, J., Jiang, C. & Wang, Z. Creating and simulating a realistic physiological tongue model for speech production. Multimed Tools Appl 76, 14673–14689 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11042-016-3929-6

Download citation

  • Received:

  • Revised:

  • Accepted:

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11042-016-3929-6

Keywords

Search

Navigation