We present DYNARTmo, a dynamic articulatory model designed to visualize speech articulation processes in a two-dimensional midsagittal plane. The model builds upon the UK-DYNAMO framework and integrates principles of articulatory underspecification, segmental and gestural control, and coarticulation. DYNARTmo simulates six key articulators based on ten continuous and six discrete control parameters, allowing for the generation of both vocalic and consonantal articulatory configurations. The current implementation is embedded in a web-based application (SpeechArticulationTrainer) that includes sagittal, glottal, and palatal views, making it suitable for use in phonetics education and speech therapy. While this paper focuses on the static modeling aspects, future work will address dynamic movement generation and integration with articulatory-acoustic modules.

Speech-driven 3D facial animation aims to generate realistic facial movements synchronized with audio. Traditional methods primarily minimize reconstruction loss by aligning each frame with ground-truth. However, this frame-wise approach often fails to capture the continuity of facial motion, leading to jittery and unnatural outputs due to coarticulation. To address this, we propose a novel phonetic context-aware loss, which explicitly models the influence of phonetic context on viseme transitions. By incorporating a viseme coarticulation weight, we assign adaptive importance to facial movements based on their dynamic changes over time, ensuring smoother and perceptually consistent animations. Extensive experiments demonstrate that replacing the conventional reconstruction loss with ours improves both quantitative metrics and visual quality. It highlights the importance of explicitly modeling phonetic context-dependent visemes in synthesizing natural speech-driven 3D facial animation.

We first outline the motivations and design principles behind our hardware nasalance system, and then present a comparison between Nosey and a commercial nasalance device. Nosey shows consistently higher nasalance scores than the commercial device, but the magnitude of contrast between phonological environments is comparable between systems. We also review ways of customizing the hardware to facilitate testing, such as comparison of microphones and different construction materials. We conclude that Nosey is a flexible and cost-effective alternative to commercial nasometry devices and propose some methodological considerations for its use in data collection.

Phonetic production bias is the external force most commonly invoked in computational models of sound change, despite the fact that it is not responsible for all, or even most, sound changes. Furthermore, the existence of production bias alone cannot account for how changes do or do not propagate throughout a speech community. While many other factors have been invoked by (socio)phoneticians, including but not limited to contact (between subpopulations) and differences in social evaluation (of variants, groups, or individuals), these are not typically modeled in computational simulations of sound change. In this paper, we consider whether production biases have a unique dynamics in terms of how they impact the population-level spread of change in a setting where agents learn from multiple teachers. We show that, while the dynamics conditioned by production bias are not unique, it is not the case that all perturbing forces have the same dynamics: in particular, if social weight is a function of individual teachers and the correlation between a teacher's social weight and the extent to which they realize a production bias is weak, change is unlikely to propagate. Nevertheless, it remains the case that changes initiated from different sources may display a similar dynamics. A more nuanced understanding of how population structure interacts with individual biases can thus provide a (partial) solution to the `non-phonologization problem'.

We investigate an approach for simultaneously committing to mul- tiple activities, each modeled as a temporally extended action in a semi-Markov decision process (SMDP). For each activity we de- fine a set of admissible solutions consisting of the redundant set of optimal policies, and those policies that ascend the optimal state- value function associated with them. A plan is then generated by merging them in such a way that the solutions to the subordinate activities are realized in the set of admissible solutions satisfying the superior activities. We present our theoretical results and em- pirically evaluate our approach in a simulated domain.

We investigate an approach for simultaneously committing to multiple activities, each modeled as a temporally extended action in a semi-Markov decision process (SMDP). For each activity we define a set of admissible solutions consisting of the redundant set of optimal policies, and those policies that ascend the optimal statevalue function associated with them. A plan is then generated by merging them in such a way that the solutions to the subordinate activities are realized in the set of admissible solutions satisfying the superior activities. We present our theoretical results and empirically evaluate our approach in a simulated domain.

We investigate an approach for simultaneously committing to multiple activities, each modeled as a temporally extended action in a semi-Markov decision process (SMDP). For each activity we define a set of admissible solutions consisting of the redundant set of optimal policies, and those policies that ascend the optimal statevalue function associated with them. A plan is then generated by merging them in such a way that the solutions to the subordinate activities are realized in the set of admissible solutions satisfying the superior activities. We present our theoretical results and empirically evaluate our approach in a simulated domain.