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This study introduces a new model for the investigation of the complex manner in which vocal tract anatomy affects human speech production and may influence language change and evolution. The anatomy of the human vocal tract has long been recognized to play a crucial role in speech production and patterning (Fant, 1971; Ohala, 1983). It imposes discrete relations between articulatory parameters and acoustics (Stevens & Keyser, 2010), with highly nonlinear mappings between them (Stevens, 1968, 1989), and it has been recently suggested that inter-individual and patterned inter-population variation in the anatomy of the vocal tract might play a role in explaining patterns of linguistic diversity (Dediu, Janssen, & Moisik, 2017). We investigate these complex relationships by instructing a computersimulated agent to learn to reproduce, as well as possible, target speech sounds by controlling the articulators of a detailed 3D geometric model of the human vocal tract based on the VocalTractLab 2.1 (Birkholz, Jackèl, & Kroger, 2006), modified to allow changes in larynx height and hard palate shape. More precisely, the agent minimizes the Euclidean distance (in the F1–F5 formant space) between the target and the produced sounds using a genetic algorithm that optimizes the synaptic weights of a neural network that maps formants to articulatory parameter values1. Here, we apply this model to two case studies, both using the five-vowel system [a], [æ], [i], [u], and [@], but investigating the effects of variation in different components of the vocal tract. In the first case study, we revisit the debate concerning the role of larynx height in human speech, which has important implications for the evolution of speech

Agent model reveals the influence of vocal tract anatomy on speech during ontogeny and glossogeny