Donna Erickson

Jaw movement is assumed to be associated with the rhythmical structure of English. Do emotion and emphasis affect the patterns of jaw movement? This is a discussion on the topic, based on results from experimental studies of mandibular characteristics of constrastive emphasis and emotion, i.e., irritation. These studies with several subjects suggest that jaw opening not only increases significantly on the corrected digit, but also the overall amount of jaw opening on all digits in the corrected exchanges increases as the speaker becomes more irritated. Jaw movement is affected by both emphasis and emotion, and it seems that the rhythm of an utterance is affected also.