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. 2013 Jul;134(1):510-9.
doi: 10.1121/1.4807639.

An investigation of articulatory setting using real-time magnetic resonance imaging

Vikram Ramanarayanan  1 , Louis Goldstein, Dani Byrd, Shrikanth S Narayanan
Affiliations

An investigation of articulatory setting using real-time magnetic resonance imaging

Vikram Ramanarayanan et al. J Acoust Soc Am. 2013 Jul.

Abstract

This paper presents an automatic procedure to analyze articulatory setting in speech production using real-time magnetic resonance imaging of the moving human vocal tract. The procedure extracts frames corresponding to inter-speech pauses, speech-ready intervals and absolute rest intervals from magnetic resonance imaging sequences of read and spontaneous speech elicited from five healthy speakers of American English and uses automatically extracted image features to quantify vocal tract posture during these intervals. Statistical analyses show significant differences between vocal tract postures adopted during inter-speech pauses and those at absolute rest before speech; the latter also exhibits a greater variability in the adopted postures. In addition, the articulatory settings adopted during inter-speech pauses in read and spontaneous speech are distinct. The results suggest that adopted vocal tract postures differ on average during rest positions, ready positions and inter-speech pauses, and might, in that order, involve an increasing degree of active control by the cognitive speech planning mechanism.

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Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
(Color online) (a) Contour outlines extracted for each image of the vocal tract. Note the template definition such that each articulator is described by a separate contour. (b) A schematic depicting the concept of vocal tract area descriptors or VTADs [adapted from Bresch and Narayanan (2009)]. These VTADs are bounded by cross-distances (depicted by white lines), and are, in order, from lips to glottis: lip aperture, tongue tip constriction degree, tongue dorsum constriction degree, velic aperture, tongue root constriction degree, and the epiglottal-pharyngeal wall cross-distance, respectively.
Figure 2
Figure 2
(Color online) Schematic showing how the jaw angle (denoted by α) is computed.
Figure 3
Figure 3
(Color online) Mean vocal tract images for all speakers calculated on all frames corresponding to different positions in the utterance and speaking style.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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