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Velocity Differences Between Velum Raising and Lowering Movements

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Speech and Computer (SPECOM 2021)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 12997))

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Abstract

This study investigated the intrinsic velocities of raising and lowering movements of the velum that are related to its biomechanical structure and aerodynamic conditions. To this end, five subjects produced cyclic transitions between nasals and fricatives as in /s-n-s-n-s-.../ with flat intonation and at two specific speaking rates to minimize contextual and prosodic effects. The velar movements were inferred from the movements of the lateral pharyngeal wall in ultrasound image sequences, which are strongly correlated. The results indicate that velum raising was significantly faster than velum lowering for the two male subjects (24%–49% faster, depending on the subject and speaking rate), but not for the three female subjects. Possible biomechanical and aerodynamic reasons for the observed velocity differences are discussed. The results can inform the interpretation of kinematic data of velar movements with regard to underlying neural control, and improve movement models for articulatory speech synthesis.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The difficulty of finding a good ultrasonic LPW reflection was also reported in [22].

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Acknowledgments

This study was funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG), grant no. BI 1639/4-1.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of Acoustics and Speech Communication, Technische Universität Dresden, Dresden, Germany

    Peter Birkholz & Christian Kleiner

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  1. Peter Birkholz
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  2. Christian Kleiner
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Correspondence to Peter Birkholz .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. St. Petersburg Federal Research Center of the Russian Academy of Sciences, St. Petersburg, Russia

    Alexey Karpov

  2. Moscow State Linguistic University, Moscow, Russia

    Rodmonga Potapova

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Birkholz, P., Kleiner, C. (2021). Velocity Differences Between Velum Raising and Lowering Movements. 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_7

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-87802-3_7

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-030-87801-6

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-87802-3

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