Temporal Organization of Cued Speech Production

Denis Beautemps (1) , Marie-Agnes Cathiard (2) , Virginie Attina (3) , Christophe Savariaux (4)

1 GIPSA-MAGIC - GIPSA - Machines parlantes, Gestes oro-faciaux, Interaction Face-à-face, Communication augmentée
2 CRI - Centre de Recherche sur l'Imaginaire
3 UWA - The University of Western Australia
4 GIPSA-Services - GIPSA-Services

Speech communication is multi-modal by nature. It is well known that hearing people use both auditory and visual information for speech perception (Reisberg, McLean et al. 1987) . For deaf people visual speech constitutes the main speech modality. Listeners with hearing loss who have been orally educated typically rely on speech-reading based on lip and facial visual information. However due to the similarity in the visual lip shapes of speech units lip-reading alone is not sufficient. Even the best speech-readers do not identify more than 50 percent of phonemes in nonsense syllables (Owens and Blazek 1985) or in words or sentences (Bernstein, Demorest et al. 2000). This chapter deals with Cued Speech, a manual augmentation for lipreading visual information. Our interest in this method was motivated by its effectiveness in allowing access to complete phonological representations of speech for deaf people from the age of one month, access to language and eventually performance in reading and writing similar to that of hearing people. Finally with the current high level of development of cochlear implants this method helps facilitate access to the auditory modality. A large amount of work has been devoted to the effectiveness of Cued Speech but none has investigated the motor organisation of Cued Speech production, i.e. the coarticulation of Cued Speech articulators. Why might the production of an artificial system as long ago as 1967 be of interest? Apart from the clear evidence that such a coding system helps in acquiring another artificial system such as reading, Cued Speech provides a unique opportunity to study lip-hand coordination at syllable level. This contribution presents a study of the temporal organisation of the manual cue in relation to the movement of the lips and the acoustic indices of the corresponding speech sound, in order to characterise the nature of the syllabic structure of Cued Speech with reference to speech coarticulation.

Domaines: Sciences de l'information et de la communication

Denis Beautemps, Marie-Agnes Cathiard, Virginie Attina, Christophe Savariaux. Temporal Organization of Cued Speech Production. Bailly, G., Perrier, P., Vatikiotis-Bateson, E. Audiovisual Speech Processing, Cambridge, UK. Cambridge University Press, pp.104-120, 2012, 978-1-107-00682-9. ⟨hal-00535536⟩