Numerical investigation of effects of incisor angle on production of sibilant /s/

Abstract

Abstract The effects of the inclination angle of the incisor on the speech production of the fricative consonant /s/ was investigated using an implicit compressible flow solver. The hierarchical structure grid was applied to reduce the grid generation time for the vocal tract geometry. The airflow and sound during the pronunciation of /s/ were simulated using the adaptively switched time stepping scheme, and the angle of the incisor in the vocal tract was changed from normal position up to 30°. The results showed that increasing the incisor angle affected the flow configuration and moved the location of the high turbulence intensity region thereby decreased the amplitudes of the sound in the frequency range from 8 to 12 kHz. Performing the Fourier transform on the velocity fluctuation, we found that the position of large magnitudes of the velocity at 10 kHz shifted toward the lip outlet when the incisor angle was increased. In addition, separate acoustic simulations showed that the shift in the potential sound source position decreased the far-field sound amplitudes above 8 kHz. These results provide the underlying insights necessary to design dental prostheses for the production of sibilant fricatives.