Neuropsychological reports and activation studies by means of positron emission tomography and functional magnetic resonance imaging have suggested that the neural correlates of phonological short-term memory are located in the left hemisphere, with Brodmann's area (BA) 40 being responsible for short-term storage, and BA 44 for articulatory rehearsal. However, a careful review of the literature...

Knowledge of vocal-tract (VT) length is a logical prerequisite for acoustic-to-articulatory inversion. Prior work has treated VT length estimation (VTLE) and inversion largely as separate problems. We describe a new algorithm for VTLE based on acoustic-to-articulatory inversion. Our inversion process uses the Maeda model (MM, [1,2]) and combines global search [3] and dynamic programming for tra...

Purpose: Two of the major functions of the human vocal tract are feeding and speaking. As ontogenetically and phylogenetically feeding tasks precede speaking tasks, it has been hypothesised that the skilled movements of the orofacial articulators specific to speech may have evolved from feeding functions. Our objective is to bring evidence to support this hypothesis. Method: Vocal tract articul...

We describe a self-organising pseudo-articulatory speech production model (SPM), and present recent results when training the system on an X-ray mi-crobeam database. The SPM extracts statistics describing articulator positions and curvatures during the production of continuous speech, then applies an explicit co-articulation model to generate synthetic articulator trajectories corresponding to ...

Although a large amount of acoustic indicators have already been proposed in the literature to evaluate the hypokinetic dysarthria of people with Parkinson's Disease, the goal of this work is to identify and interpret new reliable and complementary articulatory biomarkers that could be applied to predict/evaluate Parkinson's Disease from a diadochokinetic test, contributing to the possibility o...

In this paper, the use of multiple acoustic feature sets for speech recognition is investigated. The combination of both auditory as well as articulatory motivated features is considered. In addition to a voicing feature, we introduce a recently developed articulatory motivated feature, the spectrum derivative feature. Features are combined both directly using linear discriminant analysis (LDA)...

To become language users, infants must embrace the integrality of speech perception and production. That they do so, and quite rapidly, is implied by the native-language attunement they achieve in each domain by 6-12 months. Yet research has most often addressed one or the other domain, rarely how they interrelate. Moreover, mainstream assumptions that perception relies on acoustic patterns whe...

A model of gestural sequencing in speech is proposed that aspires to producing biologically plausible fluent and efficient movement in generating an utterance. We have previously proposed a modification of the well-known task dynamic implementation of articulatory phonology such that any given articulatory movement can be associated with a quantification of effort (Simko and Cummins, 2010). To ...

This paper presents original data in support of a new model of intonational phonology for Malay as spoken in Singapore. Building on the Autosegmental-Metrical approach (Beckman & Pierrehumbert, 1986), we propose that intonational variation in Malay can be explained in terms of underlying sequences of abstract tonal units (H and L), which are aligned to the edges and internal syllables of prosod...

A maximum likelihood parameter trajectory estimation based on a Gaussian mixture model (GMM) has been successfully implemented for acoustic-to-articulatory inversion mapping. In the conventional method, GMM parameters are optimized by maximizing a likelihood function for joint static and dynamic features of acoustic-articulatory data, and then, the articulatory parameter trajectories are estima...