Speech Kinematic Analysis from Acoustics: Scientific, Clinical and Practical Applications

Much of my research has involved studying how small changes in the spatiotemporal coordination of speech articulators affect variability in the acoustic characteristics of the speech signal. This interest in speech variability ultimately led me to develop a speech inversion (SI) system that recovers articulatory movements of the lips, tongue tip, and tongue body from the speech signal. Recently, we were able to extend the SI system to provide information about the velopharyngeal port opening (nasality) and will soon investigate a methodology to uncover information about the tongue root and the size of the glottal opening. Our SI system has proven to be speaker independent and generalizes well across acoustic databases. In this talk, I will explain how we developed the SI system, and ways in which we have used it to date: for clinical purposes in mental health and speech disorder assessment, in scientific analysis of cross-linguistic speech patterns, and for improving automatic speech recognition.