On the relationship between intra-oral pressure and speech sonority

We address the question of the relationship between two time series associated to the speech signal. The first one is the sonority function which was introduced in Galves et al. (2002) as an index of the local regularity of the speech signal. The second time series is the intra-oral pressure during the production of speech. We argue that the joint evolution of both time series can be well described by a simple probabilistic model. We show that our model is in good agreement with the results obtained by analyzing a linguistic corpus with recorded sentences in French and Kinyarwanda.