Information Theoretic Analysis of Direct Articulatory Measurements for Phonetic Discrimination

This paper focuses on the analysis of speech production signals (physical measurements from electromagnetic articulograph) from the perspective of phone discrimination. We explore two different signal representation schemes for the articulatory signals, one based on time-domain analysis and the other based on frequency domain. We quantify the amount of discrimination information offered by the speech production signals in identifying the phone labels through mutual information. Mutual information analyses establish that substantial discrimination information is present in the articulatory stream. Furthermore, phonological classification results with articulatory signals indicate higher accuracy compared to the acoustic signal.