Aryepiglottic (AE) trilling in the pharyngeals of Iraqi Arabic is observed, qualified and quantified using acoustic, EGG, kymographic, high-speed laryngoscopic and aperture estimate techniques. Articulatory stricture occurs at the superior AEfold borders of the epilaryngeal tube. Periodic AE vibration acts as a secondary phonation source. Quantitative evaluation of trilling frequency and durati...

In this paper, we use articulatory measures to determine whether Dutch schwa epenthesis is an abstract phonological process or a concrete phonetic process depending on articulatory timing. We examine tongue position during }l} before underlying schwa and epenthetic schwa and in coda position. We find greater tip raising before both types of schwa, indicating light }l} before schwa and dark }l} ...

Phonology typically describes speech in terms of discrete signs like features. The field of intonational phonology uses discrete accents to describe intonation and prosody. But, are such representations useful? The results of mimicry experiments indicate that discrete signs are not a useful representation of the shape of intonation contours. Human behaviour seems to be better represented by a a...

In previous work, we have proposed a method to control the characteristics of synthetic speech flexibly by integrating articulatory features into hidden Markov model (HMM) based parametric speech synthesis. A unified acoustic-articulatory model was trained and a piecewise linear transform was adopted to describe the dependency between these two feature streams. The transform matrices were train...

This paper proposes a new method that determines segmental duration for text-to-speech conversion based on the movement of articulatory organs which compose an articulatory model. The articulatory model comprises four time-variable articulatory parameters representing the conditions of articulatory organs whose physical restriction seems to significantly influence the segmental duration. The pa...

We present a strategy for learning Deep-Neural-Network (DNN)-based Acoustic-to-Articulatory Mapping (AAM) functions where the contribution of an articulatory feature (AF) to the global reconstruction error is weighted by its relevance. We first empirically show that when an articulator is more crucial for the production of a given phone it is less variable, confirming previous findings. We then...

Differences in male and female vocal tract dimensions are hypothesized to have a number of dynamic consequences – undershoot, greater acoustic vowel space size, articulatory speed. Evidence for some of these predictions is sought by investigating articulatory and acoustic patterns in interword vowel sequences in the University of Wisconsin X-ray Microbeam Speech Production Database (UWDB). Mean...

Tamil is unusual among the world’s languages in that some of its dialects have five liquids. This paper focuses on the articulatory characterization of these sounds, with the ultimate goal of modeling their production dynamics and articulatory-acoustic mappings. Articulatory data were o b tained using different techniques: palatography, magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), and magnetometer (EMMA)....

Articulatory effort has been widely discussed under different speech production models. A good way to explore this issue is to test the hypothesis that speakers naturally desire to minimize articulatory effort during fast speech rates, such as undershoot of the target sound. This study demonstrates articulatory effort at different speaking rates by examining articulatory trajectory using the El...