A pilot study of temporal organization in Cued Speech production of French syllables: rules for a Cued Speech synthesizer

This study investigated the temporal coordination of the articulators involved in French Cued Speech. Cued Speech is a manual complement to lipreading. It uses handshapes and hand placements to disambiguate series of CV syllables. Hand movements, lip gestures and acoustic data were collected from a speaker certified in manual Cued Speech uttering and coding CV sequences. Experiment I studied hand placement in relation to lip gestures and the corresponding sound. The results show that the hand movement begins up to 239 ms before the acoustic onset of the CV syllable. The target position is reached during the consonant, well before the vowel lip target. Experiment II used a data glove to collect finger gesture. It was designed to investigate handshape formation relatively to lip gestures and the corresponding acoustic signal. The results show that the handshape formation gesture takes a large part of the hand transition. Both experiments therefore reveal the anticipatory gesture of the hand motion over the lips. The types of control for vocalic and consonantal information transmitted by the hand are discussed in reference to speech coarticulation. Finally the temporal coordination observed between Cued Speech articulators and the corresponding sound was used as rules to control an audiovisual system delivering Cued Speech for French CV syllables. 2004 Published by Elsevier B.V.