Simulation of sentence-level speech with an acoustically driven model of speech production

This is the authors' abstract. We don't add key points for this paper.

In a model of speech production developed by Story and Bunton [JASA, 146(4), 2522–2528 (2019)] speech segments are encoded by specifying relative acoustic events along a time axis that consist of directional changes of the vocal tract resonance frequencies called resonance deflection patterns (RDPs). These events are transformed via acoustic sensitivity functions, into time-varying modulations of the vocal tract shape. For example, RDPs specifying /b, p/, /d, t/, and /g, k/ would typically be coded as [−1 −1 −1], [−1 1 1], and [−1 1 −1], respectively. The RDP changes, indicate, from left to right, the targeted directional shift of the first, second, and third resonances of the vocal tract. In addition, events that produce nasalization, voiced versus voiceless sounds, and changes in fundamental frequency are also specified the time axis. The purpose of this study was to demonstrate the use of this model to generate word- and sentence-level speech for eventual speech intelligibility studies. The process for simulating several words and sentences will be demonstrated.