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Functional and morphological modeling of the vocal tract structures is of special relevance in the fields of speech production, speech synthesis and speech disorders. Biomechanical models of the oral, laryngeal and pharyngeal structures have been developed, in recent years, with a relevant contribution, not only for a better understanding of speech production mechanisms (e.g., Gérard, Perrier, & Payan, 2006; Perrier, Payan, Zandipour, & Perkell, 2003), but also for the diagnoses and treatment of speech and sleep disorders (e.g., Fels et al., 2009).
In the speech synthesis field, articulatory synthesis (e.g., Birkholz & Kröger, 2006) is one of the most promising techniques (Shadle & Damper, 2001) fulfilling the requisites for an “ideal” speech synthesizer (e.g., to easily produce different voice qualities). Articulatory synthesis produces speech using models of physical, anatomical and physiological characteristics of the human production system. This technique models the human vocal tract directly, instead of modeling the signal or its acoustic characteristics (Teixeira, Oliveira, & Barbosa, 2008). As a consequence, this type of anthropomorphic synthesizers requires large amounts of detailed anatomic-physiological information, if possible in 3D (Teixeira et al., 2005).
From a phonetic/linguistic point of view, articulatory information and 3D models are essential for improving knowledge concerning the articulation of the different sounds. It can also be used as an auxiliary tool when teaching, e.g., foreign languages.