Tongue
The tongue is a flexible muscular organ in the mouth that manipulates food, contributes to swallowing and speech, and carries taste receptors.
Intrinsic tongue muscles: Muscles within the tongue that change its shape without moving it as a whole. They curl, flatten, and narrow the tongue during precise movements.
Oral cavity: The space inside the mouth, bounded by the lips, cheeks, palate, and floor of the mouth. The tongue occupies this space and works alongside teeth and palate.
Mastication: The process of chewing food to reduce it into smaller pieces for swallowing. The tongue continually shifts food between the teeth during chewing.
Olfaction: The sense of smell, produced when odorant molecules activate receptors in the nasal system. Smell contributes strongly to flavor, unlike the tongue’s taste system.
Extrinsic tongue muscles: Muscles that attach the tongue to surrounding structures and move it within the mouth. They reposition the tongue for chewing, swallowing, and speech.
Skeletal muscle: Muscle tissue controlled primarily by the somatic nervous system and usually attached to bones or other structures. The tongue’s muscle fibers are skeletal muscle, arranged in an unusually mobile organ.
Speech: The production of spoken language through coordinated movements of the vocal tract. Tongue placement shapes many consonants and vowels.
Flavor: The combined sensory experience of food, integrating taste, smell, texture, temperature, and other cues. Flavor is broader than taste and cannot be attributed to the tongue alone.
Lingual papillae: Small projections on the tongue, some of which contain taste buds. Their varied forms provide texture and house many of the tongue’s taste receptors.
Taste bud: A cluster of sensory cells that detects chemicals associated with taste. Taste buds embedded in parts of the tongue’s surface register dissolved food molecules.