Speech production of vowel sequences using a physiological articulatory model

Abstract

This report describes the development of a physiologically-based articulatory model, which consists of the tongue, mandible, hyoid bone and vocal tract wall. These organs are represented in a quasi-3D shape to replicate a midsagittal layer with a thickness of 2 cm for tongue tissue and 3 cm for tract wall. The geometry of these organs and muscles are extracted from volumetric MR images of a male speaker. Both the soft and rigid structures are represented by mass-points and viscoelastic springs for connective tissue, where the springs for bony organs are set to extremely large stiffness. This design is suitable to compute soft tissue deformations and rigid organ displacements simultaneously using a single algorithm, and thus reduces computational complexities of the simulation. A novel control method is developed to produce dynamic actions of the vocal tract, as well as to handle the collision of the tongue to surrounding walls. Area functions are obtained for vowel sequences based on model’s vocal tract widths in the midsagittal and parasagittal planes. The proposed model demonstrated plausible dynamic behaviors for human speech articulation. 1. MODEL CONSTRUCTION To replicate the behaviors of human speech organs, speakerspecific customization of the model was carried out by replicating the anatomical information that was obtained from volumetric MRI data of a male Japanese speaker. 1.1 Design of the Tongue Shape The tongue tissue model is designed as a thick sagittal layer bounded by three sagittal planes. This design was chosen to form the midsagittal groove of the tongue and the side airway in producing vowels and consonants. The tongue tissue has been modeled commonly using the finite element method [1,2]. Our earlier study aimed at developing an integrated model that combined an FEM model of the tongue and a beam-muscle model of the jaw-larynx system [3]. The computations of movements in this hybrid model were slow because the achievement of an equilibrium between the soft tissue and rigid organs took considerable time. One possible solution to this problem is to model all speech organs using an identical method. To the end, a mass-spring network is used to model both the soft tissue and rigid organs in the current model. The basic structure of the tongue tissue model roughly replicates the fiber orientation of the genioglossus muscle. The central part of the tongue that includes this muscle is represented by a 2-cmthick layer with three sagittal planes. Each plane is divided into six sections with nearly equal intervals in the anterior-posterior direction and ten sections along the tongue surface. The tongue tissue model is shown in Fig. 1 with the vocal tract wall. In the tongue model, the mesh lines represent viscoelastic springs, and mass-points are located in the intersections of the mesh lines. The mass-points in the midsagittal plane also connect to the corresponding mass-points in the right and left planes by the springs. To relate a deformation and a stress in the mass-spring network, the mass-points also connect with diagonally adjacent ones by the springs. Thus, the original shape can be restored from a deformation due to the strain forces when external forces are removed. The mass per unit volume is chosen to be 1 g/cm for the tongue tissue, which is the same as that of water. -2 0 2 4 6 -2 0 2 -2 0 2 4 6 Teeth Hard palate Velum P h a r y n g e a l w a l l P i r i f o r m f o s s a Larynx Jaw Fig. 1 The oblique view of three-dimensional model of the speech organs. All dimensions are in cm. The Voigt model was adopted to approximate the properties of the tongue tissue, which consists of a spring parallel to a dashpot. The mechanical parameters for the spring and the dashpot reported in the previous studies deferred widely: the stiffness ranged from 10-10 dyne/cm, and the viscosity from 10-10 dyne•s/cm [4]. In the present model, parameters were chosen to be 1.54x10 dyne/cm for the stiffness and 1.75x10 dyne•s/cm for the viscosity. 1.2 Modeling of the Rigid Organs Outlines of the rigid organs (i.e., the jaw and hyoid bone in the present work) were also traced from the MRI data for the target subject. The contours of the bony organs were identifiable in MR images when they are surrounded by soft tissue. According to the extracted geometries, the mandible is modeled by four masspoints on each side, which form two triangles using five rigid beams including one shearing-beam [5]. The mandible model is combined with the tongue model at the mandibular symphysis.