Acoustic-to-articulatory inversion is a difficult problem mainly because of the nonlinearity between the articulatory and acoustic spaces and the nonuniqueness of this relationship. To resolve this problem, we have developed an inversion method that provides a complete description of the possible solutions without excessive constraints and retrieves realistic temporal dynamics of the vocal trac...

We examine the functional coupling between articulatory characteristics of prominence, such as articulator speed, and its acoustic characteristics, such as F0 and acoustic energy, for content words (nouns) and function words (e.g., articles, prepositions and conjunctions) using real-time magnetic resonance imaging data. We use Granger causality ideas to test the degree and direction of causal i...

In this paper, we describe several approaches to integration of the articulatory dynamic parameters along with articulatory position data into a HMM/BN model based automatic speech recognition system. This work is a continuation of our previous study, where we have successfully combined speech acoustic features in form of MFCC with articulatory position observations. Articulatory dynamic parame...

Previous research [1, 2] shows that articulatory variability is reduced for people with flatter palates. It has been hypothesized [1] that this is because the mapping between articulation and acoustics is more linear for flatter than for more domed palates. A combination of two synthesizers were used to model how vocal tract anatomy influences the mapping of articulation onto acoustics, using A...

Many experiments investigating speech articulation examine the influence of linguistic or paralinguistic factors on articulatory timing. The current experiment differs from these by focusing on unconditioned variation—i.e. statistical noise—in articulatory timing. The aim is to assess whether distributions of intervals representing the relative timing of articulatory movements are well-modelled...

This paper compares prominence that listeners perceive with actual articulatory prominence. We calculated phrasal boundaries from articulatory patterns using an algorithm of the C/D model, and compared those calculated boundaries with perceived boundaries. The jaw displacements, measures of prominence, were measured using EMA; articulatory boundaries were derived from a C/D model algorithm. The...

This paper investigates the interplay between articulatory movement and voice source activity as a function of emotions in speech production. Our hypothesis is that humans use different modulation methods in which articulatory movements and prosodic modulations are differently weighted across different emotions. This hypothesis was examined by joint analysis of the two domains, using two statis...

This paper describes our progress on articulatory voice mimic. The objective is to achieve an articulatory voice mimic system as a basis for low bit-rate speech coding using articulatory codebooks. The articulatory codebook uses a suitable vocal tract model for generating shapes for all possible speech sounds. When building a codebook, unrealistic vocal tract shapes may be generated. In this pa...

The article presents an HMM-based mapping approach for converting ultrasound and video images of the vocal tract into an audible speech signal, for a silent speech interface application. The proposed technique is based on the joint modeling of articulatory and spectral features, for each phonetic class, using Hidden Markov Models (HMM) and multivariate Gaussian distributions with full covarianc...

This research aims to perform articulatory analysis as a basis for low bit-rate speech coding. The classical approach consists of gathering a large set of acoustic and articulatory vector pairs in a codebook. Then, based on some criteria, the non-uniqueness of the articulatory trajectories is solved using a dynamic optimization procedure. An articulatory codebook requires a model capable of gen...