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. 2009 Nov;126(5):EL160-5.
doi: 10.1121/1.3213452.

Analysis of pausing behavior in spontaneous speech using real-time magnetic resonance imaging of articulation

Vikram Ramanarayanan, Erik Bresch, Dani Byrd, Louis Goldstein, Shrikanth S Narayanan

Analysis of pausing behavior in spontaneous speech using real-time magnetic resonance imaging of articulation

Vikram Ramanarayanan et al. J Acoust Soc Am. 2009 Nov.

Abstract

It is hypothesized that pauses at major syntactic boundaries (i.e., grammatical pauses), but not ungrammatical (e.g., word search) pauses, are planned by a high-level cognitive mechanism that also controls the rate of articulation around these junctures. Real-time magnetic resonance imaging is used to analyze articulation at and around grammatical and ungrammatical pauses in spontaneous speech. Measures quantifying the speed of articulators were developed and applied during these pauses as well as during their immediate neighborhoods. Grammatical pauses were found to have an appreciable drop in speed at the pause itself as compared to ungrammatical pauses, which is consistent with our hypothesis that grammatical pauses are indeed choreographed by a central cognitive planner.

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Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
An illustration of the gradient energy calculation process: first, contour outlines are obtained from the MRI images in panel A and are then converted to binary masks (panel B); these are then used to compute the “gradient” images (panel C), the energy of which is then calculated by a simple addition operation (of all white pixels).
Figure 2
Figure 2
Pause length distributions for grammatical and ungrammatical pauses.
Figure 3
Figure 3
Time-normalized average gradient frame energies (in squared pixels) of grammatical and ungrammatical pauses and their neighborhoods pooled across all seven speakers (standard deviation bars are plotted on top of each energy bar in a lighter color). Corresponding average local phone rates (phones/s) are also shown to the right of the gradient frame energy panel. Each panel consists of two pause groups on the x-axis: (1) grammatical and (2) ungrammatical. Group 1 consists of, in order, bars for two neighborhoods immediately before the grammatical pause (∼250 ms), followed by one bar for the pause itself (not shown for phone rate graph), followed by two bars for the neighborhoods following the pause (∼250 ms); this set of five bars is followed by a parallel sequence of five bars for the ungrammatical pauses (Group 2).
Figure 4
Figure 4
A schematic depicting the levels (grammatical and ungrammatical) and sites (prepause, pause, and postpause) at which the ANOVA statistical analyses were performed.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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