Recognition of semivowels and consonants in continuous speech using articulatory parameters

Articulatory parameters estimated from speech waves were used for the recognition of semivowels and consonants in continuous speech. It has been shown that introduction of the articulatory model in speech recognition is one effective method to solve the difficulties of coarticulation phenomena and speaker differences. In this paper, the recognition of semivowels and consonants is discussed. As for semivowels, it is found that the phase difference between the movement of the tongue and that of the jaw is important to characterize semivowels, and this can be effectively used in the recognition. In the case of consonants, it is possible to find the typical feature of each consonant which corresponds to its place of articulation in the transient parts of the articulatory parameters. A preliminary experiment adopting the DP matching technique in VCV contexts gave fairly hopeful results. And for nasal sounds, it is shown that introduction of the nasal model is useful. The nasal model consists of the nasal cavity and the velum parameter.