Identification of stop consonants produced by an acoustically-driven model of a child-like vocal tract

Abstract

A model of a child-like vocal tract has been developed such that the deformation patterns superimposed on a vowel substrate to generate coarticulated consonants are specified by a time-varying set of directional shifts in the first three resonance frequencies. These deflection patterns are denoted as a combination of three numbers each of which can vary between -1 and 1; a negative value implies a downward shift in a resonance frequency whereas an upward shift results for positive value. For example, a “bilabial” consonant specified as [-1,-1,-1] would be transformed via calculations of acoustic sensitivity functions to a time-varying vocal tract shape that presents the expected constriction at the lips, but also modifies other parts of the vocal tract that may be necessary for producing the appropriate formant transitions into and out of the consonant. Using this model, three sets of 30 VCV utterances were generated in which the values of deflection patterns were set to produce vocal tract shapes that hy...