Abstract
Technologies, such as electromagnetic midsagittal articulography (EMA) and real-time magnetic resonance (RT-MRI), can contribute to improve our understanding of the static and dynamic aspects of speech, namely by providing information regarding which articulators are essential (critical) in producing specific sounds and how (gestures). Previous work has successfully demonstrated the possibility to determine critical articulators considering vocal tract data obtained from RT-MRI. However, these works have adopted a conservative approach by considering vocal tract representations analogous to the flash points obtained with EMA data, i.e., landmarks fixed over the articulators, e.g., tongue. To move towards a data-driven method able to determine gestural scores, e.g., driving articulatory speech synthesis, one important step is to move into a representation aligned with Articulatory Phonology and Task Dynamics. This article advances towards this goal by exploring critical articulators determination considering a vocal tract representation aligned with this framework is adopted and presents first results considering 50 Hz RTMRI data for two speakers of European Portuguese.
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Acknowledgements
This work is partially funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF, with the project ‘Synchronic variability and change in European Portuguese’), by IEETA Research Unit funding (UID/CEC/00127/2019), by Portugal 2020 under the Competitiveness and Internationalization Operational Program, and the European Regional Development Fund through project SOCA – Smart Open Campus (CENTRO-01–0145-FEDER-000010) and project MEMNON (POCI-01-0145-FEDER-028976). We thank all the participants for their time and voice and Philip Hoole for the scripts for noise suppression.
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Silva, S., Cunha, C., Teixeira, A., Joseph, A., Frahm, J. (2020). Towards Automatic Determination of Critical Gestures for European Portuguese Sounds. In: Quaresma, P., Vieira, R., Aluísio, S., Moniz, H., Batista, F., Gonçalves, T. (eds) Computational Processing of the Portuguese Language. PROPOR 2020. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 12037. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-41505-1_1
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