Neuro-Muscular Specification of Linguistic Units

Abstract

The technique of electromyography was utilized to investigate the relationship which exists between linguistic units and muscular activity. Muscle action potentials of the orbicularis oris muscle were recorded from three subjects. A LINC computer was used to sum and average the EMG signals of 20 tokens of 54 CVC monosyllables. The results showed that no simple correspondence exists between phonemes and motor commands. Different gestures produce /b/ and /p/ in initial and final position of an utterance. It was also shown that electromyography can be used to test linguistic hypotheses regarding particular languages. Two alternative inferences are suggested from the fact that the neural muscular correlate of a given phoneme is different in different phonetic contexts : (1) the minimal linguistic unit corresponding to the motor commands which produce speech is larger than the phoneme, perhaps more of the order of a syllable ; (2) motor commands related to phoneme production are altered, i.e. context restricted, either by feedback information concerning the existing state of muscular motion, or by stored information in the short-term memory. Further investigation is necessary before any conclusions can be reached.