Abstract

How the speech production and perception systems evolved in humans still remains a mystery today. Previous research suggests that human auditory systems are able, and have possibly evolved, to preserve maximal information about the speaker's articulatory gestures. This paper attempts an initial step toward answering the complementary question of whether speakers’ articulatory mechanisms have also evolved to produce sounds that can be optimally discriminated by the listener's auditory system. To this end we explicitly model, using computational methods, the extent to which derived representations of “primitive movements” of speech articulation can be used to discriminate between broad phone categories. We extract interpretable spatio-temporal primitive movements as recurring patterns in a data matrix of human speech articulation, i.e., representing the trajectories of vocal tract articulators over time. To …

Date

2016

Authors

Vikram Ramanarayanan, Maarten Van Segbroeck, Shrikanth S Narayanan

Journal

Computer speech & language

Volume

36

Pages

330-346

Publisher

Academic Press