Italian Consonantal Visemes: Relationships Between Spatial/temporal Articulatory Characteristics and Coproduced Acoustic Signal

In order to identify the Italian consonantal visemes, to verify the results of perceptive tests and elaborate rules for bimodal synthesis and recognition, the 3D (lip height, lip width, lower lip protrusion) lip target shapes for all the 21 Italian consonants were determined. Moreover, the spatio-temporal characteristics of the closure/opening movements for the realisation of these consonantal targets were studied relative to the lip height (LH) parameter together with the temporal relationships between the characteristics of this articulatory movement and the co-produced acoustic signal.