Coarticulation & Speech Target Undershoot

Real speech rarely hits its articulatory targets cleanly — adjacent sounds blend into each other, a phenomenon phoneticians call coarticulation. This simulator renders that as a real dynamical system: a tongue-body point in a simplified articulatory space (front–back, height, rounding) is pulled toward a sequence of vowel targets by a critically-damped mass-spring model, exactly the task-dynamics framework used in speech-motor-control research. The main map shows front–back position against height and can be panned and zoomed; a side gauge tracks the third dimension, lip rounding, live. Raise the speech rate and the articulator runs out of time to reach each target before the next one is issued — quantified live as a percentage undershoot and logged in a running history strip — while the stiffness and damping sliders show how muscle dynamics themselves shape how sharply or sluggishly speech sounds are actually produced.