Dynamical System Modelling of Articulator Movement

We describe the modelling of articulatory movements using (hidden) dynamical system models trained on Electro-Magnetic Articulograph (EMA) data. These models can be used for automatic speech recognition and to give insights into articulatory behaviour. They belong to a class of continuous-state Markov models, which we believe can offer improved performance over conventional Hidden Markov Models (HMMs) by better accounting for the continuous nature of the underlying speech production process – that is, the movements of the articulators. To assess the performance of our models, a simple speech recognition task was used, on which the models show promising results.