Relationship between articulatory acoustic vowel space and articulatory kinematic vowel space

Abstract

The current study examines the relationship between articulatory acoustic vowel space and kinematic vowel space with an emphasis on the range of tongue movement by utilizing electromagnetic articulography. Subject population is 20 healthy female speakers. Electromagnetic articulography (AG-200) and a synchronized separate digital audio recording system were utilized to obtain kinematic and high quality acoustic data. Three coils on the tongue (tip, body, and dorsum) and one coil on the lower lip were used. To examine both intra- and inter- speaker relationship between articulatory acoustic and kinematic spaces, speech samples of ten different tasks that elicited various articulatory space sizes were collected. Each speaker produced three repetitions of four corner vowels in /h/-vowel-/d/ and /d/-vowel-/d/ consonant environments embedded in a carrier phrase in five different speaking styles (habitual, fast, slow, loud, and soft). Articulatory working space was generated from coordinates of first and second formant frequencies from acoustic data, and position X and Y from each coil kinematic data. Both acoustic and kinematic coordinate data are obtained at the same time sampling point. Results will be discussed in terms of amount of variance of acoustic vowel space explained by kinematic articulatory space and issues of interpretation of acoustic vowel space.