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 …

Date

2013

Authors

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

Journal

The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America

Volume

134

Issue

1

Pages

510-519

Publisher

AIP Publishing