Evaluation of Juncture Strength using Articulatory Synthesis of Prosodic Gestures and Functional Data Analysis
Benjamin Parrell, Sungbok Lee, Dani Byrd, University of Southern California
Prosodic boundary gestures (pi-gestures) (Byrd and Saltzman, J. Phon., 2003) have been introduced to model the local slowing or lengthening of articulatory gestures in the vicinity of phrase boundaries. In this paper, pi-gestures are simulated within the TaDA task dynamics computational model and examined using functional data analysis (FDA) to evaluate articulatory lengthening in terms of underlying pi-gesture activation duration and strength from a realistic control model. A new derived variable of “deformation index” (area under FDA time-deformation functions) is shown to capture differences in π-gesture effect due to boundary strength.