Visualization of Mandarin articulation by using a physiological articulatory model

It is difficult for language learners to produce unfamiliar speech sounds accurately because they may not manipulate articulatory movements precisely by auditory feedback alone. Visual feedback can help identify the errors and promote the learning progress, especially in language learning and speech rehabilitation fields. In this paper, we propose a visualization method for Mandarin phoneme pronunciation using a three-dimensional (3D) articulatory physiological model driven by Chinese Electromagnetic Articulographic (EMA) data. A mapping from EMA data to physiological articulatory model was constructed using three points on the mid-sagittal plane of the tongue. To do so, we analyzed configurations of 30 Chinese phonemes based on an EMA database. At the same time, we designed nearly 150,000 muscle activation patterns and applied them to the physiological model to generate model-based articulatory movements. As the result, we developed a visualized articulation system with 2.5 dimensional and 3D views respectively. The mapping was evaluated using MRI data. It is found that the mean deviation was about 0.21cm for seven vowels.