Representations of electromagnetic articulography data for tongue shaping and vocal tract configuration

Electromagnetic articulography (EMA) measurements of the movements of articulator flesh points have predominantly been used to investigate kinematics of individual points and/or coordinative phasing between them. Such limited use of EMA data is in fact wasteful of information. In this preliminary report we introduce two representations of EMA data: one is a representation of lingual configuration derived from three individual flesh points on the tongue, and the other is a representation of the vocal tract configuration information based on a lower-dimensional representation of Euclidean distances between EMA articulatory points. The motivation is to maximize the use of information in the original EMA data and measurements in a way that allows for the representation of tongue shaping and vocal tract configuration, thereby maximizing the use of information available from EMA and basic EMA measurements. Implications of such representations and their patterning will be discussed in the light of speech product...