Quantitative Association Of Orofacial And Vocal-Tract Shapes

This paper examines the degrees of correlation among vocal tract and orofacial movement data and the speech acoustics. Multilinear techniques are applied to support the claims that orofacial motion during speech is largely a by-product of producing the speech acoustics and further that the spectral envelope of the speech acoustics is better estimated by the 3D motion of the face than the mid-sagittal motion of the anterior vocal tract (lips, tongue, and jaw). 1 INTRODUCTION During speech production, the motion of the vocaltract shapes the speech acoustics. Vocal-tract motion also deforms the face through the positioning of the jaw, shaping of the lips, and puffing of the cheeks. Thus, as we have argued elsewhere (Munhall & Vatikiotis-Bateson in press, Vatikiotis-Bateson et al. 1996, Vatikiotis-Bateson et al. in press), visible correlates to the speech arise as a direct consequence of vocal-tract motion, and these correlates extend over a much larger region of the face than just the i..