Influence of Articulator and Manner on Stiffness

The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 2017

This study examined the contributions of the tongue tip (TT), tongue body (TB), and tongue lateral (TL) sensors in the electromagnetic articulography (EMA) measurement of American English alveolar consonants. Thirteen adults produced /ɹ/, /l/, /z/, and /d/ in /ɑCɑ/ syllables while being recorded with an EMA system. According to statistical analysis of sensor movement and the results of a machine classification experiment, the TT sensor contributed most to consonant differences, followed by TB. The TL sensor played a complementary role, particularly for distinguishing /z/.

Journal of Phonetics, 1977

The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 2010

In this paper, we quantify the time-varying coordination of articulator motion for two speakers engaged in two faceto-face speaking tasks: repetition of simultaneously produced words (and word-pairs) and conversation. Correlation map analysis is used to compute the time-varying, correlation between pairs of signals for all possible pairings of signal values. The resulting two-dimensional map of correlation values captures the fluctuations that occur naturally in the coordination within and between speakers, regardless of whether the behaviors are intentionally synchronized or merely entrained (as in conversation). This not only provides a more accurate picture of the correlation between signals, but also underlines the importance of treating fluctuations as potentially important components of biological behavior, rather than discounting them simply as noise.

PLoS ONE, 2014

We address the hypothesis that postures adopted during grammatical pauses in speech production are more ''mechanically advantageous'' than absolute rest positions for facilitating efficient postural motor control of vocal tract articulators. We quantify vocal tract posture corresponding to inter-speech pauses, absolute rest intervals as well as vowel and consonant intervals using automated analysis of video captured with real-time magnetic resonance imaging during production of read and spontaneous speech by 5 healthy speakers of American English. We then use locally-weighted linear regression to estimate the articulatory forward map from low-level articulator variables to high-level task/goal variables for these postures. We quantify the overall magnitude of the first derivative of the forward map as a measure of mechanical advantage. We find that postures assumed during grammatical pauses in speech as well as speech-ready postures are significantly more mechanically advantageous than postures assumed during absolute rest. Further, these postures represent empirical extremes of mechanical advantage, between which lie the postures assumed during various vowels and consonants. Relative mechanical advantage of different postures might be an important physical constraint influencing planning and control of speech production.

Archives of Oral Biology, 2011

K.A. Mays). a v a i l a b l e a t w w w . s c i e n c e d i r e c t . c o m journal homepage: http://www.elsevier.com/locate/aob 0003-9969/$ -see front matter #

2003

Simultaneous measurements of tongue and facial motion, using a combination of electromagnetic articulography (EMA) and optical motion tracking, are analysed to im- prove the articulation of an animated talking head and to investigate the correlation between facial and vocal tract movement. The recorded material consists of VCV and CVC words and 270 short everyday sentences spoken by one Swedish subject.

Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 2013

Speech audio and articulatory movements of age-and gender-matched speaker pairs have been recorded in face-to-face interaction using two electromagnetic articulometer (EMA) systems simultaneously. Speakers matched for language (AE:AE) were compared with mixed language backgrounds (AE:German). Tasks included synchronized, imitated and spontaneous speech interspersed with repeated baseline utterances for evaluation of mutual accommodation. Euclidean distances (EDs) between vowel midpoint formant frequencies from the initial and final baseline tasks showed symmetric reductions associated with convergence which were larger for the speakers with the same language background. To test whether the observed reduction might be due to fatigue or repetition effects EDs were also calculated between AE speakers who did not participate in the same experiment. Because reduction was minimal for this comparison the possibility that convergence can be attributed to simple optimization is excluded. Kinematic and dynamic convergence was examined on coda velar gestures from the baseline tasks. EDs in peak velocity, sensor path distance, gesture amplitude and stiffness computed between speakers all showed decreases consistent with convergence. Associated within-speaker differences showed that accommodation was effectively symmetric, and because the speakers moved towards one another the difference was not due to practice or fatigue effects.

This study is a first step in a large-scale study that aims at quantifying the relationship between external facial movements, tongue movements, and the acoustics of speech sounds. The database analyzed consisted of 69 CV syllables spoken by two males and two females; each utterance was repeated four times. A Qualysis (optical motion capture system) and an EMA (electromagnetic midsaggital articulography) system were used to characterize facial and tongue movements, respectively. Acoustic features were represented by linear spectral pairs (LSP). To quantify the correlation between them, a multilinear regression technique was applied. The results were analyzed in terms of vowel context, place of articulation, and individual articulatory (EMA or Optical) or acoustic (LSP) channel.

2001

This paper summarizes the results of a series of experiments conducted to investigate various aspects of normal pharyngeal articulation and the nature of pharyngeal coarticualtion. Video fiberscopic imaging, electromagnetography and acoustic analysis techniques were used to obtain empirical and quantitative data on the use of the pharynx in speech production. The overall results suggest that mechanical constraints determine to a great extent the articulatory strategy used by the speaker to achieve the perceptual/acoustic contrast essential for the process of speech encoding.

2014 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP), 2014

There is a significant need for more comprehensive electromagnetic articulography (EMA) datasets that can provide matched acoustics and articulatory kinematic data with good spatial and temporal resolution. The Marquette University Electromagnetic Articulography Mandarin Accented English (EMA-MAE) corpus provides kinematic and acoustic data from 40 gender and dialect balanced speakers representing 20 Midwestern standard American English L1 speakers and 20 Mandarin Accented English (MAE) L2 speakers, half Beijing region dialect and half are Shanghai region dialect. Three dimensional EMA data were collected at a 400 Hz sampling rate using the NDI Wave system, with articulatory sensors on the midsagittal lips, lower incisors, tongue blade and dorsum, plus lateral lip corner and tongue body. Sensors provide three-dimensional position data as well as two-dimensional orientation data representing the orientation of the sensor plane. Data have been corrected for head movement relative to a fixed reference sensor and also adjusted using a biteplate calibration system to place the data in an articulatory working space relative to each subject's individual midsagittal and maxillary occlusal planes. Speech materials include isolated words chosen to focus on specific contrasts between the English and Mandarin languages, as well as sentences and paragraphs for continuous speech, totaling approximately 45 minutes of data per subject. A beta version of the EMA-MAE corpus is now available, and the full corpus is in preparation for public release to help advance research in areas such as pronunciation modeling, acoustic-articulatory inversion, L1-L2 comparisons, pronunciation error detection, and accent modification training.