Estimation of the acoustic properties of the nasal tract during the production of nasalized vowels

Accurate estimation of velar movements is useful for automatic speech recognition, speech enhancement, and diagnosis of certain speech disorders. This paper reports on initial results of a project on estimation of velar movements, for two-microphone setups where the microphones are differentially positioned to pick up nasal and oral speech output. Toward this goal, we propose a method that allows detailed estimation of the acoustic properties of the nasal tract in the simplified condition where the two microphone signals exhibit complete source separation. We successfully test the method against synthetic speech, generated by an articulatory synthesizer in which the acoustic properties of the simulated nasal tract are known.