Articulatory Consequences of Vocal Effort Elicitation Method

Articulatory features from two datasets, Slovak and Swedish, were compared to see whether different methods of eliciting loud speech (ambient noise vs visually presented loudness target) result in different articulatory behavior. The features studied were temporal and kinematic characteristics of lip separation within the closing and opening gestures of bilabial consonants, and of the tongue body movement from /i/ to /a/ through a bilabial consonant. The results indicate larger hyper- articulation in the speech elicited with visually presented target. While individual articulatory strategies are evident, the speaker groups agree on increasing the kinematic features equally within each gesture in response to the increased vocal effort. Another concerted strategy is keeping the tongue response at a minimum, presumably to preserve acoustic prerequisites necessary for the adequate vowel identity. While the method of visually presented loudness target elicits larger span of vocal effort, the two elicitation methods achieve comparable consistency per loudness conditions.Peer reviewe

Mapping articulatory parameters on formant patterns : From articulations to acoustics non-stop

The traditional way of estimating the formant frequencies from articulatory data presupposes knowledge of how the vocal tract cross-sectional area varies for a given articulatory shape (Fant 1960/1970). Accordingly, in order to derive the formant pattern of a given articulation, the three-dimensional shape of the vocal tract (VT) needs to be known. In the past cross-sectional areas have typically been derived by means of ‘d-to-A rules’ that use the mid-sagittal cross-distance d at each point along the VT to produce a corresponding cross-sectional area A. X-ray and MRI data have been used to calibrate such rules (Heinz & Stevens 1964, Sundberg et al. 1987, Ericsdotter 2005). Although this procedure has produced many useful results it is time consuming and laborious. It is speaker-specific. It presupposes access to information on the three-dimensional shape of the VT, which is not experimentally readily accessible. Such observations raise the question whether sufficiently accurate alternative approaches can be developed. Is it possible to go straight from articulatory data to formant frequencies without having to construct a cross-sectional area function? If such methods could be developed it would have many uses both in phonetics and practical applications. This paper reports an attempt to map the time variations of selected articulatory parameters from X-ray profiles directly on the formant tracks using multiple regression analysis. Preliminary results for F1 indicate that multiple regression analysis can indeed be useful for making such predictions. The prospects of extending the present analyses to other formants are discussed

Mapping articulatory parameters on formant patterns : From articulations to acoustics non-stop

The traditional way of estimating the formant frequencies from articulatory data presupposes knowledge of how the vocal tract cross-sectional area varies for a given articulatory shape (Fant 1960/1970). Accordingly, in order to derive the formant pattern of a given articulation, the three-dimensional shape of the vocal tract (VT) needs to be known. In the past cross-sectional areas have typically been derived by means of ‘d-to-A rules’ that use the mid-sagittal cross-distance d at each point along the VT to produce a corresponding cross-sectional area A. X-ray and MRI data have been used to calibrate such rules (Heinz & Stevens 1964, Sundberg et al. 1987, Ericsdotter 2005). Although this procedure has produced many useful results it is time consuming and laborious. It is speaker-specific. It presupposes access to information on the three-dimensional shape of the VT, which is not experimentally readily accessible. Such observations raise the question whether sufficiently accurate alternative approaches can be developed. Is it possible to go straight from articulatory data to formant frequencies without having to construct a cross-sectional area function? If such methods could be developed it would have many uses both in phonetics and practical applications. This paper reports an attempt to map the time variations of selected articulatory parameters from X-ray profiles directly on the formant tracks using multiple regression analysis. Preliminary results for F1 indicate that multiple regression analysis can indeed be useful for making such predictions. The prospects of extending the present analyses to other formants are discussed

From movements to sound Contributions to building the BB speech production system

In terms of anatomical geometry the infant Vocal Tract undergoes significant change during development. This research note reports an attempt to reconstruct an infant VT from adult data. Comparable landmarks were identified on the fixed structures of adult articulatory lateral profiles (obtained from X-ray images) and matching infant profiles (obtained from published data in the literature, Sobotta [Putz & Pabst 2001, and personal communication from author Prof. Dr. med. R. Pabst]. The x-coordinates of the infant landmarks could be accurately derived by a linear scaling of the adult data whereas the y-values required information on both the x- and the y-coordinates of the adult. These scaling rules were applied to about 400 adult articulatory profiles to derive a set of corresponding infant articulations. A Principal Components Analysis was performed on these shapes to compare the shapes of the infant and adult articulatory spaces. As expected from the scaling results the infant space is significantly compressed in relation to the adult space suggesting that the main articulatory degree of freedom for the child is jaw opening. This finding is in perfect agreement with published descriptions of the phonetics of early vocalizations.

Longitudinal Studies of Variation Sets in Child-directed Speech

One of the characteristics of child-directed speech is its high degree of repetitiousness. Sequences of repetitious utterances with a constant intention, variation sets, have been shown to be correlated with children’s language acquisition. To obtain a baseline for the occurrences of variation sets in Swedish, we annotate 18 parent–child dyads using a generalised definition according to which the varying form may pertain not just to the wording but also to prosody and/or non-verbal cues. To facilitate further empirical investigation, we introduce a surface algorithm for automatic extraction of variation sets which is easily replicable and language-independent. We evaluate the algorithm on the Swedish gold standard, and use it for extracting variation sets in Croatian, English and Russian. We show that the proportion of variation sets in child-directed speech decreases consistently as a function of children's age across Swedish, Croatian, English and Russian.Modelling the emergence of linguistic structures in early childhoo