In this paper we show that there is measurable information in the articulatory system which can help to disambiguate the acoustic signal. We measure directly the movement of the lips, tongue, jaw, velum and larynx and parameterise this articulatory feature space using principal components analysis. The parameterisation is developed and evaluated using a speaker dependent phone recognition task ...

The effortless speech production in humans requires coordinated movements of the articulators such as lips, tongue, jaw, velum, etc. Therefore, measured trajectories obtained are smooth and slowly-varying. However, the trajectories estimated from acoustic-to-articulatory inversion (AAI) are found to be jagged. Thus, energy minimization is used as smoothness constraint for improving performance ...

Medial movements of the lateral pharyngeal wall at the level of the velopharyngeal port were examined by using a computerized ultrasound system. Subjects produced CVNVC sequences involving all combinations of the vowels /a/ and /u/ and the nasal consonants /n/ and /m/. The effects of both vowels on the CVN and NVC gestures (opening and closing of the velopharyngeal port, respectively) were asse...

The articulatory description of European Portuguese (EP) requires the analysis of different anatomical structures (e.g. tongue dorsum and velum), and the study of dynamic aspects of speech production. The use of real-time magnetic resonance imaging (RT-MRI), with frame rates above 10 frames/s, provides adequate support for these studies and results in a large amount of images that need to be pr...

Progamotaenia capricorniensis sp. nov. (Cestoda: Anoplocephalidae) is described from the wallabies Macropus dorsalis (Gray, 1837) and Petrogale assimilis Ramsay, 1877 from Queensland, Australia. The new species is characterised by a fimbriated velum composed of 26-32 digitiform to triangular projections on each side of the proglottis, paired uteri and 140-190 testes distributed in a single band...

Larvae of the nudibranch mollusc Phestilla sibogae metamorphose in response to a small organic compound released into seawater by their adult prey, the scleractinian coral Porites compressa. The transformations that occur during metamorphosis, including loss of the ciliated velum (swimming organ), evacuation of the shell, and bodily elongation, are thought to be controlled by a combination of n...

Investigations of the motor organization of speech show that if we can identify individual segmental requirements, we can begin to predict the manner in which segments will influence each other in fluent speech. That is, we can model coarticulation as the outcome of temporal overlap (coproduction) among characteristic speech movements for successive segments (e.g., BellBerti & Harris, 1981; Fow...

The Ikema dialect of Miyako Island in Okinawa, Japan, has typologically rare word-initial and voiced geminate obstruents (e.g. /vva/ ‘you’, /ffa/ ‘child’, /tta/ ‘tongue’, /badda/ ‘side’). These sounds are marked two ways: Voicing through is hard to produce initial voiceless plosives seem be difficult perceive. This study investigated real-time magnetic resonance imaging (rt-MRI) examine the art...

This paper introduced a new speech production model aiming at synthesizing natural speech in real-time by modeling the key dynamic properties of the articulators in a nonlinear state-space framework. The goal-oriented movement of the tongue tip, tongue dorsum, upper lip, lower lip and jaw are described in a linear state equation. The so produced articulatory trajectories combined with the effec...