Articulatory synthesis and perception of plosive-vowel syllables with virtual consonant targets

Virtual articulatory targets are a concept to explain the different trajectories of primary and secondary articulators during consonant production, as well as the different places of the tongue-palate contact depending on the context vowel, for example in [igi] vs. [ugu]. The virtual targets for the tongue tip and the tongue body in apical and dorsal plosives are assumed to lie above the palate, and for bilabial consonants, the target is a negative degree of lip opening. In the present study, we discuss the concept of virtual targets and its application for articulatory speech synthesis. In particular, we examined how the location of virtual targets affects the acoustics and intelligibility of synthetic plosive-vowel syllables. It turned out that virtual targets that lie about 10 mm beyond the consonantal closure location allow a more precise reproduction of natural speech signals than virtual targets at a distance of about 1 mm. However, we found no effect on the intellegibility of the consonants.