Blind inversion and the perception/production link

Abstract

Whether humans recover articulator positions from acoustics in the course of speech perception has been debated for years. Some of the arguments against recovering articulator positions are relevant for machine speech recognition as well. However, techniques for blind inversion, in which the mapping from acoustics to articulation is learned without known articulator trajectories, were not considered when some of these arguments were being developed. We discuss the impact of blind inversion on the debate, and conclude that there are pragmatic reasons to recover articulation from acoustics, particularly when blind inversion is used and the mapping from articulation to acoustics is many-to-one.