Very neat: moving x-ray images of speech. If i knew how to make a .gif work on tumblr, you could see it in action. Since I can’t, click through to see the original.
Things to notice:
-Underneath the jaw there’s a bone. It looks like it’s floating because it kind of is. That’s your hyoid bone. Your tongue and your larynx (“voice box”) are attached to the hyoid. But no other bones attach to it. And since muscles and cartilages don’t show up on this CT, the hyoid is just kind of hanging out by itself.
-Behind the hyoid bone, to the left you can see the cervical vertebrae.
-Between the vertebrae and the hyoid there’s some lighter space. That’s the opening to the larynx. Above the white space is a thin, sticky-outy- thing It looks vaguely phallic from this angle. That’s your epiglottis. It’s job is to cover the opening to your larynx, which is right in front of your esophagus- when you swallow. If food or water gets into your larynx, it can go straight down your trachea into your lungs, causing you to choke- or if the stuff causes an infection, you can get pneumonia. So you want your epiglottis to work.
(image via hundertmarkblog.de; anatomy lesson via years and years and thousands of dollars of grad classes in speech-language pathology)
We’ve been doing the “the vocal tract is a resonating tube” thing—vowels are a series of tubes, yes—in my phonetics class, so I see this and think “wow, the lips really are quite far from the teeth!” (Rounding the lips extends the tube and hence lowers the frequency values of the formants.)
