Feedforward control of a 3d physiological articulatory model for vowel production

A 3D Physiological articulatory model has been developed to account for the biomechanical properties of speech organs in speech production. To control the model for investigating the mechanism of speech production, a feedforward control strategy is necessary to generate proper muscle activations according to desired articulatory targets. In this paper, we elaborated a feedforward control module for the 3D physiological articulatory model. In the feedforward control process, an input articulatory target, specified by articulatory parameters, is transformed to intrinsic representation of articulation; then, a muscle activation pattern by a proposed mapping function. The results show that the proposed feedforward control strategy is able to control the proposed 3D physiological articulatory model with high accuracy both acoustically and articulatorily.