Analysis and display techniques for correlating articulatory and phonetic features in speech production
Winston L. Nelson, Osamu Fujimura, S. Alfredson · The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 1979
A large body of speech-articulation data is being assembled using the x-ray microbeam system [Fujimura, Kiritani, and Ishida, Comp. Biol. Med. 3, 377–381 (1973)]. Once the phonetic elements of the speech utterances have been aligned with the articulatory data [Nelson, J. Acoust. Soc. Am. Suppl. 1 65, S22 (A) (1979)], it is possible to access and analyze the articulatory and acoustic data by phonetic feature. This paper discusses several techniques which have been developed for both statistical and detailed analyses of articulatory-phonetic relationships. In particular, two-dimensional histograms of x-ray pellet positions for many occurrences of a phonetic feature are useful for testing various assumptions and hypotheses concerning the principal articulatory conditions for that feature. For example, the retraction of the back of the tongue characterizing /1/ in different phonetic environments [Fujimura, Miller, and Escolar, J. Acoust. Soc. Am. Suppl. 1 61, S48 (A) (1977)] can be easily and quantitatively demonstrated.