Acoustic-articulatory correlations in a four-region model of the vocal tract: Theoretical bases and a comparison of two data sets

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Mark Pennington

Abstract

A 27-tube frequency-domain vocal tract model (FDVT) was developed to calculate the formant frequencies F1–F4 and the quality or amplification factors Q1–Q4. Four articulator regions are distinguished in the FDVT model: an 8-tube tongue root region, a 9-tube tongue body region (one quarter wavelength at the F2 formant frequency), a 6-tube blade region (one quarter wavelength at the F3 formant frequency), and a 4-tube lip region (one quarter wavelength at the F4 formant frequency). The vowel area functions of 10 speakers were previously investigated by the author (Pennington, 2011). More recently, Tiede (2013) gave the vowel area functions of another 12 speakers. To determine the degree of association between acoustic and articulatory parameters, correlation matrices are computed for the vowel system of each speaker. Then the correlation coefficients of the parameter pairs are averaged across the 10 speakers in the original data set and the 12 speakers in the Tiede data set. This study has two goals. The first is to compare the correlation results of the original and the Tiede vowel data sets. The second is to provide theoretical foundations for the observed acoustic-articulatory correlates. The following is a preview of the correlation results: (1) tongue root aperture (tongue root area divided by lip area) is inversely correlated with F1; (2) tongue body position (forebody area divided by hindbody area) is inversely correlated with F2; (3) tongue body aperture (tongue body area divided by lip area) is directly correlated with Q2; (4) blade position (foreblade area divided by hindblade area) is inversely correlated with F3; (5) blade aperture (blade area divided by lip area) is directly correlated with Q3; (6) lip length is inversely correlated with F4; (7) lip area is inversely correlated with Q4.

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