# Enhancing Acoustic-to-Articulatory Speech Inversion by Incorporating Nasality

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.09231 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.09231/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 10 Jun 2025.

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [ARTI-6: Towards Six-dimensional Articulatory Speech Encoding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.21447/) (2025)
- [Articulation-Informed ASR: Integrating Articulatory Features into ASR via Auxiliary Speech Inversion and Cross-Attention Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.08585/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Speech is produced through the coordination of vocal tract constricting organs: lips, tongue, velum, and glottis. Previous works developed Speech Inversion (SI) systems to recover acoustic-to-articulatory mappings for lip and tongue constrictions, called oral tract variables (TVs), which were later enhanced by including source information (periodic and aperiodic energies, and F0 frequency) as proxies for glottal control. Comparison of the nasometric measures with high-speed nasopharyngoscopy showed that nasalance can serve as ground truth, and that an SI system trained with it reliably recovers velum movement patterns for American English speakers. Here, two SI training approaches are compared: baseline models that estimate oral TVs and nasalance independently, and a synergistic model that combines oral TVs and source features with nasalance. The synergistic model shows relative improvements of 5% in oral TVs estimation and 9% in nasalance estimation compared to the baseline models.