A virtual talking head was adapted to show articulatory movements of the lips, jaw, tongue, and velum. A JavaScript program with a graphical user interface in HTML was developed for speech therapists to use the talking head as a tool in speech therapy. In an initial study children’s productions of words containing the sounds /s/ and /z/ were recorded and evaluated before and after two short lea...

1 Background .................................................................................................................................1 1 Visible speech synthesis .........................................................................................................2 2 Illustrative experiment of evaluation testing ..........................................................................

The present paper describes first results on impaired articulation after partial glossectomy and oral reconstruction. The tongue movements are recorded by dynamic MRI (8 images per second) while the patients utter test words involving all lingual consonants of German. Along 13 lines of a semicircular grid, the tongue–palate distance is measured for all consonants, and preand postoperative movem...

A new genus and species Callopistiella atacamensis gen. nov. and sp. nov. (Acariformes: Pterygosomatidae) are described from Callopistes maculatus (Squamata: Teiidae) in Chile. In this species, both sexes are characterized by the hypostome without a velum, the chelicerae proximally globose and very thin distally, ending in a movable digit curved outward, the fixed cheliceral digit reduced to a ...

The importance of modeling speech articulation for high-quality audiovisual (AV) speech synthesis is widely acknowledged. Nevertheless, while state-of-the-art, data-driven approaches to facial animation can make use of sophisticated motion capture techniques, the animation of the intraoral articulators (viz. the tongue, jaw, and velum) typically makes use of simple rules or viseme morphing, in ...

1.1. Post-nasal voicing (T > D / N ) is well attested and phonetically well motivated, both as a synchronic process and as a sound change. Locke (1983) identifies 15 of 197 languages with synchronic post-nasal voicing (PNV).1 Voicing of stops in post-nasal position is phonetically well motivated: it is the result of a combination of nasal leak and “compression” by the velum (Hayes and Stivers 2...

Nasality is a very important characteristic of several languages, especially European Portuguese. This paper addresses the challenge of nasality detection in EMG-based speech interfaces. By combining EMG data with real time imaging information, we explore the existence of useful information on the EMG data about the velum movement. Results indicate that is possible to “detect” zones of nasality...

Male and female reproductive systems of Stolas conspersa (Germar) (Coleoptera, Chrysomelidae, Cassidinae). The male and female reproductive systems of Stolas conspersa (Germar, 1824) are described and illustrated for the first time. The male reproductive system shows no difference from the subfamily pattern, which is a tubular well-developed median lobe; “Y”, “V” or T-shaped tegmen; reduced pyg...

In order to recover the movements of usually hidden articulators such as tongue or velum, we have developed a data-based speech inversion method. HMMs are trained, in a multistream framework, from two synchronous streams: articulatory movements measured by EMA, and MFCC + energy from the speech signal. A speech recognition procedure based on the acoustic part of the HMMs delivers the chain of p...