The conventional approach for data-driven articulatory synthesis consists of modeling the joint acoustic-articulatory distribution with a Gaussian mixture model (GMM), followed by a post-processing step that optimizes the resulting acoustic trajectories. This final step can significantly improve the accuracy of the GMM frame-by-frame mapping but is computationally intensive and requires that th...

A well-known difficulty in using the articulatory representation for applications in the areas of speech coding, synthesis and recognition is the poor accuracy in the estimation of the articulatory parameters from the acoustic signal of speech. The difficulty is especially serious for most classes of consonantal sounds. This paper presents a statistical method of estimating the articulatory tra...

Sound patterns of vowel harmony reduce articulatory effort which facilitates speech production with increased speech rate and accuracy. We argue that back harmony patterns reduce articulatory effort compared to height harmony and non-harmony patterns and harmony patterns formed from front unrounded (FU) vowels reduce articulatory effort compared to those of front rounded (FR)vowels. We report o...

This paper proposes a model of speaker-normalized acoustic-toarticulatory mapping using statistical voice conversion. A mapping function from acoustic parameters to articulatory parameters is usually developed with a single speaker’s parallel data. Hence the constructed mapping model can work appropriately only for this specific speaker, and applying this model to other speakers degrades the pe...

In this paper, a new bidirectional neural network for better acoustic-articulatory inversion mapping is proposed. The model is motivated by the parallel structure of human brain, processing information by having forward-inverse connections. In other words, there would be a feedback from articulatory system to the acoustic signals emitted from that organ. Inspired by this mechanism, a new bidire...

Traditional models of adult language processing and production include two levels of representation: lexical and sublexical. The current study examines the influence of the inclusion of a lexical representation (i.e. a visual referent and/or object function) on the stability of articulation as well as on phonetic accuracy and variability in typically developing children and children with specif...

The researchers designed this study to demonstrate the role played by the phonological loop as defined by Baddeley's model of working memory (2000). The operation of the phonological loop can be disrupted by oral repetition of sounds while attempting to utilize working memory, a task known as articulatory suppression. The study utilized a between-group, experimental design to demonstrate the ef...

The articulatory distinctiveness among vowels has been frequently characterized descriptively based on tongue height and front-back position; however, very few empirical methods have been proposed to characterize vowels based on timevarying articulatory characteristics. Such information is not only needed to improve knowledge about the articulation of vowels but also to determine the contributi...

HLSyn is a quasi-articulatory synthesizer (independent of any particular language) with a small set of parameters, which model the complex acoustic consequences of vocal tract. The primary motivation of using HLSyn is to combine the ‘simplicity of control’ of articulatory synthesizers with ‘accuracy and efficiency’ of formant synthesizers. The aim of this paper is to analyze the quality of nonn...

This paper describes a method for determining the vocal tract spectrum from articulatory movements using a Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM) to synthesize speech with articulatory information. The GMM on joint probability density of articulatory parameters and acoustic spectral parameters is trained using a parallel acousticarticulatory speech database. We evaluate the performance of the GMM-based m...