From EMG to Formant Patterns of Vowels: The Implication of Vowel Spaces
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Shinji Maeda
Abstract
With a few exceptions, EMG data are interpreted with reference to the intended output, such as the phonetic description of utterances spoken by speakers. For a more rigorous interpretation, the data should also be analysed in terms of the displacement of the articulators and the acoustic patterns. In this paper, we describe our attempts to calculate the formant patterns from EMG activity patterns via an articulatory model. The value of the model parameters, such as the tongue body position or tongue body shape, is derived from the EMG activities of the specific pairs of antagonistic tongue muscles. The model-calculated F<sub>1</sub>-F<sub>2</sub> patterns for 11 American English vowels correspond rather well with those measured from the acoustic signals. What strikes us is the simplicity of the mappings from the muscle activities to vocal-tract configurations and to the formant patterns. We speculate that the brain optimally exploits the morphology of the vocal tract and the kinematic functions of the tongue muscles so that the mappings from the muscle activities (production) to the acoustic patterns (perception) are simple and robust.
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© 1994 S. Karger AG, Basel
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Special Section
- Contents, Vol. 51, No.1-3, 1991
- Paper
- Editors’ Introduction
- ‘Speaker’ and ‘Speech’ Characteristics: A Deductive Approach
- From EMG to Formant Patterns of Vowels: The Implication of Vowel Spaces
- Individual Variation in Measures of Voice
- Glottal Stops and Glottalization in German
- Tongue Body Kinematics in Velar Stop Production: Influences of Consonant Voicing and Vowel Context
- What’s in a Schwa?
- Durational Correlates of Quantity in Swedish, Finnish and Estonian: Cross-Language Evidence for a Theory of Adaptive Dispersion
- Evidence for the Adaptive Nature of Speech on the Phrase Level and Below
- Some Distributional Facts about Fricatives and a Perceptual Explanation
- Listeners’ Normalization of Vowel Quality Is Influenced by ‘Restored’ Consonantal Context
- The Phonological Reality of Locus Equations across Manner Class Distinctions: Preliminary Observations
- Musical Significance of Musicians’ Syllable Choice in Improvised Nonsense Text Singing: A Preliminary Study
- Cross-Language Differences in Phonological Acquisition: Swedish and American /t/
- The Nature and Origins of Ambient Language Influence on Infant Vocal Production and Early Words
- Conventional, Biological and Environmental Factors in Speech Communication: A Modulation Theory
- Prolegomena to a Theory of the Sound Pattern of the First Spoken Language
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Special Section
- Contents, Vol. 51, No.1-3, 1991
- Paper
- Editors’ Introduction
- ‘Speaker’ and ‘Speech’ Characteristics: A Deductive Approach
- From EMG to Formant Patterns of Vowels: The Implication of Vowel Spaces
- Individual Variation in Measures of Voice
- Glottal Stops and Glottalization in German
- Tongue Body Kinematics in Velar Stop Production: Influences of Consonant Voicing and Vowel Context
- What’s in a Schwa?
- Durational Correlates of Quantity in Swedish, Finnish and Estonian: Cross-Language Evidence for a Theory of Adaptive Dispersion
- Evidence for the Adaptive Nature of Speech on the Phrase Level and Below
- Some Distributional Facts about Fricatives and a Perceptual Explanation
- Listeners’ Normalization of Vowel Quality Is Influenced by ‘Restored’ Consonantal Context
- The Phonological Reality of Locus Equations across Manner Class Distinctions: Preliminary Observations
- Musical Significance of Musicians’ Syllable Choice in Improvised Nonsense Text Singing: A Preliminary Study
- Cross-Language Differences in Phonological Acquisition: Swedish and American /t/
- The Nature and Origins of Ambient Language Influence on Infant Vocal Production and Early Words
- Conventional, Biological and Environmental Factors in Speech Communication: A Modulation Theory
- Prolegomena to a Theory of the Sound Pattern of the First Spoken Language
