Speech variation and the use of distance metrics on the articulatory feature space

This paper describes ongoing research on the relation between variation in speech in the articulatory-acoustic domain and the variation as represented in the symbolic domain. More specifically, we address variation in speech as represented by articulatory features, and the description of variation in phone annotation and segmentation. Variation in speech is quantified by using distance metrics defined on the space spanned by articulatory features. We will show a very good correspondence between locations of events in the articulatory feature trajectories on the one hand, and the phone boundary locations as defined by manual segmentation on the other. This indicates that the asynchronous articulatory representation at least captures the information in the segmentation on phone level. The proposed technique can be used for designing alternative representations of the speech signal to describe phonetic-linguistic phenomena, including intrinsic variation, and for automatic annotation and segmentation procedures. 1