Speech Behavior Analysis by Articulatory Observations

In articulatory phonetics, the place and manner of articulation indicate setting and action of the articulators during production of speech sounds. The place and manner are varied in pronouncing phonetic components such as vowel, bilabial, and alveolar. Moreover, the place and manner differ across individual speakers in realizing the same phoneme. Hence, our study attempts at analyzing those ways of articulation during speech production. To do so, the electromagnetic articulograph is used for recording the articulatory information so that the speaker-specific behavior of the articulators can be explored. In this study, the ways of articulation among different speakers was investigated by applying an articulatory recognition technique, and the contribution of each sensor's location to articulation was evaluated. In the results, two different production behaviors were observed, suggesting different behavioral rules for producing varied phonemes, and the contribution of the tongue surface regions were larger than other articulators among the subjects.