US, Oct. 14 -- The anatomical differences in our vocal tracts could be one of the sources of our Tower of Babel - the vast difference in languages spoken around the world, according to a study published in the open access journal PLOS Biology.

To better understand how anatomical and articulatory variation might affect how a speaker sounds, the authors of this study analyzed data from 32 speakers (16 male and 16 female) from the USC 75-Speaker Speech MRI Database, an open-source collection of real-time Magnetic Resonance Imaging (rtMRI) conducted during speech tasks, focusing on American English vowels.

The authors found that the subjects had widely different vocal tracts and used very different ranges of motion in those tracts to produ...