Importance of parasagittal sensor information in tongue motion capture through a diphonic analysis

Our study examines the information obtained by adding two parasagittal sensors to the standard midsagittal configuration of an Electromagnetic Articulography (EMA) observation of lingual articulation. In this work, we present a large and phonetically balanced corpus obtained from an EMA recording session of a single English native speaker reading 1899 sentences from the Harvard and TIMIT corpora. According to a statistical analysis of the diphones produced during the recording session, the motion captured by the parasagittal sensors has a low correlation to the midsagittal sensors in the mediolateral direction. We perform a geometric analysis of the lateral tongue by the measure of its width and using a proxy of the tongue’s curvature that is computed using the Menger curvature. To provide a better understanding of the tongue sensor motion we present dynamic visualizations of all diphones. Finally, we present a summary of the velocity information computed from the tongue sensor information.