Speaker’s Articulatory Strategy Analysis: Theoretical Framework and Preliminary Experiment

Abstract:
During speech production, the vocal tract is articulated to achieve specific articulatory-acoustic goals. The generated signal conveys concomitantly phonetic information to be understood and speaker-specific characteristics. In particular, the speaker has a specific anatomical morphology that influences the articulatory strategy that he/she implements. This study proposes a theoretical framework to decompose the articulations into morphology and articulatory strategy constituents. The articulatory strategy constituent is further decomposed into a speaker-independent sub-constituent, related to the articulation of the phoneme, and a speakerspecific sub-constituent, related to the idiosyncratic articulatory strategy of the speaker for the considered phone. This framework is tested on 12 speakers articulating [a i u] to analyse whether the speaker-specific articulatory strategy tends to increase the size of the vowel triangle in the F1-F2 formant plane for enhanced intelligibility.