Concatenative synthesis is currently the favoured approach to text-to-speech synthesis, yet it has fundamental limitations. In the longer-term, articulatory synthesis has much greater potential. Different approaches to articulatory synthesis are discussed in terms of the choices made concerning the articulatory processes modelled, the simplifying assumptions, and the data collected.

We describe our recent work on improving an overlapping articulatory feature (sub-phonemic) based speech recognizer with robustness to the requirement of training data. A new decision-tree algorithm is developed and applied to the recognizer design which results in hierarchical partitioning of the articulatory state space. The articulatory states associated with common acoustic correlates, a ph...

Two experiments compared young and older adults in order to examine whether aging leads to a larger dependence on visual articulatory movements in auditory-visual speech perception. These experiments examined accuracy and response time in syllable identification for auditory-visual (AV) congruent and incongruent stimuli. There were also auditory-only (AO) and visual-only (VO) presentation modes...

A Hidden-Articulator Markov Model (HAMM) is a Hidden Markov Model (HMM) in which each state represents an articulatory configuration. Articulatory knowledge, known to be useful for speech recognition [4], is represented by specifying a mapping of phonemes to articulatory configurations; vocal tract dynamics are represented via transitions between articulatory configurations. In previous work [1...

Articulatory speech synthesis currently has two perspectives. (i) Technical perspective: Due to progress in common computer hardware (general increase in computation rate) and software (usability of compilers and simulation software) it is now possible to develop comprehensive phonetic models of speech production reaching nearly real-time for the calculation of acoustic speech signals. Furtherm...

In this paper, we apply signal approximation theory to estimate the articulatory trajectory for a nonlinear speech synthesizer. First, we analyze the L2 error bounds of interpolation and LS approximation in the Hilbert space framework. Second, we use two signal approximation techniques, speci cally, cubic spline interpolation and the LS approximation to estimate the trajectory of articulatory p...