The Articulatory Code and Related OVC-Gestures

The articulatory code is composed of three sub-codes describing the phones uttered during a cortical syllable. Each sub-code encodes clusters of 'constriction parameters' describing the constrictions of the vocal tract similarly to manner & place features. Each set of sub-codes describes a specific set of gestures defined as Opening, Vowel, and Closure gestures respectively, defining the set of OVC-gestures. They represent the smallest units used in speech production and speech perception. The timing of the OVC-gestures is steered by the articulatory rhythm composed of entrained ϴ - and nested ɤ-oscillations. In speech production, the articulatory rhythm determines the starting points of the OVC-gestures; in speech perception, the articulatory rhythm segments the auditory signal into OVC-gestures bottom up. To train models for speech production and speech perception, a reference speech corpus labeled into OVC-gestures with boundaries defined by the articulator rhythm is needed. To the author's knowledge, such a speech corpus does not exist. The paper presents an approach to produce such a corpus by enhancing an articulatory speech database. The main idea is to use the quasi-rhythmic opening and closing gesture of the jaw to retrieve the ϴ-oscillation together with the OVC-gestures.