The following contribution addresses several issues concerning speech degrees of freedom in French oral vowels, stop, and fricative consonants based on an analysis of tongue and lip shapes extracted from cineradio-and labio-films. The midsagittal tongue shapes have been submitted to a linear decomposition where some of the loading factors were selected such as jaw and larynx position while four other components were derived from principal component analysis ͑PCA͒. For the lips, in addition to

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... e more traditional protrusion and opening components, a supplementary component was extracted to explain the upward movement of both the upper and lower lips in ͓v͔ production. A linear articulatory model was developed; the six tongue degrees of freedom were used as the articulatory control parameters of the midsagittal tongue contours and explained 96% of the tongue data variance. These control parameters were also used to specify the frontal lip width dimension derived from the labio-film front views. Finally, this model was complemented by a conversion model going from the midsagittal to the area function, based on a fitting of the midsagittal distances and the formant frequencies for both vowels and consonants.