TRAJECTORY FORMATION OF ARTICULATORY MOVEMENTS FOR A GIVEN SEQUENCE OF PHONEMES

The method proposed here produces trajectories of articulatory movements based on a kinematic triphone model and the mimimum-jerk model. The kinematic triphone model, which is constructed from articulatory data obtained in the experiments through the use of a magnetic sensor system, is characterized by three kinematic features for a triphone and intervals between two successive phonemes in the triphone. After extracting a kinematic feature for a phoneme in a given sentence, for each point on the articulator, the minimum-jerk trajectory which coincides with the extremum of the time integral of the square of the magnitude of jerk of the point is formulated, which requires only linear computation. The method predicts both the qualitative features and the quantitative details experimentally observed.