Constructing Physically Realistic VCV Stimuli for the Perception of Stop Voicing in European Portuguese

Daniel Pape (1, 2) , Jesus Luis M.T. (2) , Pascal Perrier (1)

1 GIPSA-MAGIC - GIPSA - Machines parlantes, Gestes oro-faciaux, Interaction Face-à-face, Communication augmentée
2 IEETA - Institute of Electronics and Telematics Engineering of Aveiro

In this book chapter we present the generation of physically realistic stimuli with a biomechanical speech production model, with the aim to produce perceptually appropriate VCV sets for the European Portuguese (EP) voicing distinction. The duration measures necessary for the biomechanical model were extracted from an extensive EP speech production database, recorded for this aim. The same database was used to generate realistic voicing extinction contours for the perceptual continuum. To assess the realistic accuracy of the biomechanically generated stimuli, we compared the biomechanical stimuli set to linear interpolation between articulatory targets, traditionally used for speech synthesis.

Keywords: biomechanical modelling; perceptual cues; cue weighting; European Portuguese; voicing perception

Domains: Linguistics; Linguistics; Psychology; Other

Daniel Pape, Jesus Luis M.T., Pascal Perrier. Constructing Physically Realistic VCV Stimuli for the Perception of Stop Voicing in European Portuguese. PROPOR 2012 - International Conference on Computational Processing of the Portuguese Language, Apr 2012, Coimbra, Portugal. pp.338-349. ⟨hal-00684224⟩