ESTIMATION OF PLACE OF CONSTRICTION DURING STOP CLOSURES BY BIVARIATE SURFACE MODELING
Milind S. Shah, Prem C. Pandey · 2008
Speech-training systems providing visual feedback of vocal tract shape are found to be useful for improving vowel articulation. Estimation of vocal tract shape, based on LPC and other analysis techniques, generally fails during stop closures, due to low signal energy and unavailability of spectral information. A technique has been investigated for the estimation of place of constriction during stop closures by performing bivariate polynomial surface modeling on vocal tract area values during transition segments preceding and following the closure and their interpolation during closure segment. The place of constriction estimated with our technique compared well with the actual constriction locations observed from the articulatory data in /Ca/ utterances. The technique can be used for improving effectiveness of speech-training systems for the production of stop consonants. Keywords-Estimation of place of constriction, Speech training aids, Vocal tract shape estimation.