Compared with the usual acoustic representations, articulatory models offer potential benefits in giving a compact, slowly changing representation, having a closer relationship with the phonetic domain and allowing a straightforward treatment of coarticulation and transitional effects. A long-standing difficulty preventing the realisation of these benefits is the estimation of appropriate parameters from the speech signal. This paper reviews recent progress in this area and describes some initial experiments that attempt to estimate the parameters of the recently proposed Distinctive Regions Model (DRM) [1], using a dynamic programming search of an articulatory codebook.