Constructing Physically Realistic VCV Stimuli for the Perception of Stop Voicing in European Portuguese

In this book chapter we present the generation of physically realistic stimuli with a biomechanical speech production model, with the aim to produce perceptually appropriate VCV sets for the European Portuguese (EP) voicing distinction. The duration measures necessary for the biomechanical model were extracted from an extensive EP speech production database, recorded for this aim. The same database was used to generate realistic voicing extinction contours for the perceptual continuum. To assess the realistic accuracy of the biomechanically generated stimuli, we compared the biomechanical stimuli set to linear interpolation between articulatory targets, traditionally used for speech synthesis.