Regenerating the spectral shapes of [s] and [∫] from a limited set of articulatory parameters

Abstract

This work was aimed at exploring articulatory-acoustic relationships in the production of French fricatives. More precisely, an attempt was made to find out whether the spectral shapes of [s] and [■] can be regenerated from the x and y coordinates of three electromagnetic transducers affixed to the tongue in the midsagittal plane. The corpus was composed of the two fricatives /s/ and /■/ combined with the vowels /a/ and /i/ in sequences of the type /Vs■V/ and /V■sV/, and was read by one male native speaker of French. The spectrum regeneration was based on a statistical procedure which consisted of estimating the factors explaining the main part of the acoustic variance from the position of the transducers, by means of multiple linear regression. The articulatory-acoustic correlations were high and allowed us to regenerate the fricative spectra with a good accuracy. The way in which the acoustic parameters varied as a function of the articulatory ones in the statistical model was in good agreement with data reported in previous works. The results support the idea that the tongue has relatively few degrees of freedom in the production of [s] and [■].