Abstract
European Portuguese (EP) nasal vowels are characterised by their dynamic nature entailing a gradual variation from an oral into a nasal configuration. The analysis of velar dynamics assumes a particular relevance for improving our understanding of nasal vowel production with an impact, e.g., on articulatory synthesis. Following on previous work, considering EMA and real-time magnetic resonance imaging (RT-MRI), at 14 fps, this study revisits the work regarding the characterisation of EP nasal vowels by analysing gesture timings considering articulatory data obtained from RT-MRI of the vocal tract at a higher frame rate (50 fps) and a larger number of speakers. The analysis, considering eleven EP speakers, characterises the duration of opening and closing velar gestures and explores synchronisation with the previous oral gesture (start-to-release lag) and the potential influence of vowel height in this regard.
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Acknowledgements
This work is partially funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF, KZ:01UL1712X), IEETA Research Unit funding (UIDB/00127/2020), 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), project MEMNON (POCI-01–0145-FEDER-028976). A word of thanks is due to Dr Christopher Carignan for sharing the scripts serving as basis for extracting the lip and velar aperture data from the RT-MRI sequences.
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Almeida, N., Cunha, C., Silva, S., Teixeira, A. (2021). Assessing Velar Gestures Timing in European Portuguese Nasal Vowels with RT-MRI Data. In: Karpov, A., Potapova, R. (eds) Speech and Computer. SPECOM 2021. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 12997. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-87802-3_3
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