Inference of Critical Articulator Position for Fricative Consonants

Inversion aims to estimate the articulatory movements which support an acoustic speech signal. Within the acoustic–to–articulatory mapping framework, time frequency atoms had been also employed. The main focus of present work is estimating the relevant acoustic information, in terms of statistical association, for the inference of critical articulators position; in particular, those involved on production of fricatives. The χ information measure is used as the measure statistical dependence. The relevant time–frequency features are calculated for the MOCHA–TIMIT database, where the articulatory information is represented by trajectories of specific positions in the vocal tract. Relevant features are estimated on fricative phones, for which tongue tip and lower lip are known to be critical. The usefulness of the relevant maps is tested in an acoustic–to–articulatory mapping system based on gaussian mixture models. In addition, it is shown that relevant features offer potential usefulness on solving the speaker-independent articulatory inversion problem.