Relationship between lip shapes and acoustical characteristics during speech

A quantitative knowledge of the articulatory characteristics is necessary for understanding the dynamics of speech production. Accordingly, it is expected that observations of the shape of mouth will provide useful data for the study on articulatory behaviors in speech production. This paper describes characteristic changes in the shape of the mouth on the basis of processed image data taken by high-speed video recorder, and studies recognition tests jointly using articulatory behavior of lips and sound pattern during speech. The speech material used in this paper were nonsense words of form /eCVCe/ (V: a, i, u, e, o, C: p, b, m). Subject were four adult males, all of them were native speaker of Japanese. In recognition of the consonant, consonant was more closely related with shape pattern than formant pattern. These results show effect of consonant (/p/, /b/, and /m/) on the middle vowel of utterance.