Quantifying Articulatory Distinctiveness of Vowels

Authors

Jun Wang, University of Nebraska-LincolnFollow
Jordan R. Green, University of Nebraska-LincolnFollow
Ashok Samal, University of Nebraska-LincolnFollow
David B. Marx, University of Nebraska-LincolnFollow

Date of this Version

8-2011

Citation

Wang, J., Green, J. R., Samal, A., Marx, D.B. (2011). Quantifying articulatory distinctiveness of vowels, Interspeech, 277-280.

Comments

28-31 August 2011, Florence, Italy
Copyright © 2011 ISCA

Abstract

The articulatory distinctiveness among vowels has been frequently characterized descriptively based on tongue height and front-back position; however, very few empirical methods have been proposed to characterize vowels based on time-varying articulatory characteristics. Such information is not only needed to improve knowledge about the articulation of vowels but also to determine the contribution of articulatory imprecision to poor speech intelligibility. In this paper, a novel statistical shape analysis was used to derive a vowel space that depicted the quantified articulatory distinctiveness among vowels based on tongue and lip movements. The effectiveness of the approach was supported by vowel classification accuracy of up to 91.7%. The theoretical relevance and clinical implication of the derived vowel space were discussed.