In speech production, the anatomical morphology forms the substrate on which the speakers build their articulatory strategy to reach specific articulatory-acoustic goals. The aim of this study is to characterize morphological inter-speaker variability by building a shape model of the full vocal tract including hard and soft structures. Static magnetic resonance imaging data from 41 speakers articulating altogether 1947 phonemes were considered, and the midsagittal articulator contours were manually outlined. A phoneme-independent average-articulation representative of morphology was calculated as the speaker mean articulation. A principal component analysis-driven shape model was derived from average-articulations, leading to five morphological components, which explained 87% of the variance. Almost three-quarters of the variance was related to independent variations of the horizontal oral and vertical pharyngeal lengths, the latter capturing male-female differences. The three additional components captured shape variations related to head tilt and palate shape. Plane wave propagation acoustic simulations were run to characterize morphological components. A lengthening of 1 cm of the vocal tract in the vertical or horizontal directions led to a decrease in formant values of 7%–8%. Further analyses are required to analyze three-dimensional variability and to understand the morphological-acoustic relationships per phoneme. Average-articulations and model code are publicly available (https://github.com/tonioser/VTMorphologicalModel).
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March 2023
March 21 2023
Morphological and acoustic modeling of the vocal tract
Antoine Serrurier
;
Antoine Serrurier
a)
Clinic for Phoniatrics, Pedaudiology, and Communication Disorders, University Hospital and Medical Faculty of the RWTH Aachen University
, 52057 Aachen, Germany
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Christiane Neuschaefer-Rube
Christiane Neuschaefer-Rube
Clinic for Phoniatrics, Pedaudiology, and Communication Disorders, University Hospital and Medical Faculty of the RWTH Aachen University
, 52057 Aachen, Germany
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a)
Electronic mail: [email protected]
J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 153, 1867–1886 (2023)
Article history
Received:
September 15 2022
Accepted:
February 07 2023
Citation
Antoine Serrurier, Christiane Neuschaefer-Rube; Morphological and acoustic modeling of the vocal tract. J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 1 March 2023; 153 (3): 1867–1886. https://doi.org/10.1121/10.0017356
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