A gesture-based dynamic model describing articulatory movement data

A quantitative dynamic model for the description of speech movements using a critically damped linear second-order system is proposed. This six-parameter model is able to fit natural movement data with high accuracy. Since in this approach the actual location of gestural onset and gestural offset, i.e., the location and duration of gestural activation, results from the fitting procedure, no advance sectioning of movement traces is necessary. The model parameters are target position, eigenperiod, and four time parameters describing the temporal location of gestural onset and offset. The fitting algorithm is tested on simulated and natural data in order to evaluate the accuracy of the fits and the repeatability of the dynamic parameters extracted.