The goal of this work is to recover articulatory information from the speech signal by acoustic-to-articulatory inversion. One of the main difficulties with inversion is that the problem is underdetermined and inversion methods generally offer no guarantee on the phonetical realism of the inverse solutions. A way to adress this issue is to use additional phonetic constraints. Knowledge of the p...

This paper presents part of an ongoing research program which aims to apply mathematical and geometrical analytic methods to vowel formant data to enable the quantification of parameters of variation of interest to sociophoneticians. We open with an overview of recent research working towards a set of desiderata for choice of normalization algorithm(s) based on replicable procedures. We then pr...

We illustrate how a high-dimension feature space typically used in speech technology can be adapted to the phonetic description of vowels in 13 accents of the British Isles. In a previous work (Ferragne & Pellegrino, 2010), we carried out a formant investigation of the vowel systems of the British Isles; due to erroneous formant estimation, two-thirds of the speakers had to be left out. The pre...

The goal of this work is to recover articulatory information from the speech signal by acoustic-to-articulatory inversion. One of the main difficulties with inversion is that the problem is underdetermined and inversion methods generally offer no guarantee on the phonetical realism of the inverse solutions. A way to adress this issue is to use additional phonetic constraints. Knowledge of the p...

This study explores whether there is an asymmetry with respect to the perceptual salience of an increase vs. a decrease of phonologically relevant features. A forced-choice discrimination experiment was conducted on stimulus pairs that included one member with unchanged phonetic features and the other with either increased or decreased degree of features (i.e., vowel nasality or VOT). The resul...

The present study will focus on occurrence of fully voiced, devoiced and elided high vowels in Japanese. High vowels elision in Japanese is supported by clear acoustic evidences, even though it is not globally accepted by scholars in the field. Elided vowels, hence, are considered here to have their own status. Moreover, this study is conceived in order to state differences and analogies among ...

Previous research on categorical perception of speech sounds has demonstrated a strong influence of language experience on the categorical perception of consonants and lexical tones. In order to explore the influence of language experience on vowel perception, the present study investigated the perceptual performance for Mandarin and Korean listeners along a vowel continuum, which spanned three...

Purpose. To investigate the impact of deep brain stimulation of the subthalamic nucleus (STN DBS) and levodopa intake on vowel articulation in dysarthric speakers with Parkinson's disease (PD). Methods. Vowel articulation was assessed in seven Quebec French speakers diagnosed with idiopathic PD who underwent STN DBS. Assessments were conducted on- and off-medication, first prior to surgery and ...