Coupled Oscillator Planning Model of Speech Timing and Syllable Structure

Louis Goldstein (1, 2) , Hosung Nam (1) , Elliot Saltzman (1, 3) , Ioana Chitoran (4, 5)

1 Haskins Laboratories
2 USC - University of Southern California
3 BU - Boston University [Boston]
4 Dartmouth College [Hanover]
5 CLILLAC-ARP (URP_3967) - Centre de Linguistique Inter-langues, de Lexicologie, de Linguistique Anglaise et de Corpus

A fundamental problem in understanding speech production is how the temporal coherence of the speech units associated with a given lexical unit is maintained despite changes due to speaking rate, prosodic embedding, and transient perturbations. To address this, a dynamical model of temporal planning of speech has been developed [21, 13, 26, 27). In this model, each speech unit (constriction gesture) is associated with a planning oscillator, or clock, and the oscillators within the ensemble associated with a particular lexical item are coupled to one another in a pattern represented as a coupling graph. Given this model, it is possible to account for syllable structure in terms of intrinsic modes of coupling and the topology of the coupling graph. Onset consonant gestures are hypothesized to be coupled in-phase to the tautosyllabic vowel (regardless of how many there are in an onset), while coda consonant gestures are coupled in an anti-phase pattern. This topology can account simultaneously for regularities in relative timing and variability, and examples of this will be discussed. Despite successes obtained with the model, it is clear that there are examples in which the same syllable structure can exhibit different patterns of timing, depending, e.g., on the place of articulation of the consonants in the cluster [10], manner [7] and language [17]. In this paper, we will also illustrate how these different patterns of timing can be modeled using coupling graphs with differing topologies and/or with different quantitative specification of coupling strength associated with the graph's edges. .

Domaines: Linguistique

Louis Goldstein, Hosung Nam, Elliot Saltzman, Ioana Chitoran. Coupled Oscillator Planning Model of Speech Timing and Syllable Structure. Fant, C. Gunnar M.; Fujisaki, Hiroya; Shen, Jiaxuan. Frontiers in phonetics and speech science, The Commercial Press, pp.239-249, 2009, 978-7-10-006769-0. ⟨hal-03127293⟩