SPAN: Speech Production and Articulation kNowledge Group

The SPAN Group bridges multiple interdisciplinary departments, labs and projects at USC. It brings together faculty and students from the Viterbi School of Electrical Engineering, the College's Department of Linguistics, and the Department of Computer Science.

An appropriate understanding of how language is produced in space and time directly informs, and is informed by, our knowledge of the phonological representation of speech, a representation that we take to be intrinsically articulatory and dynamic. The SPAN Group is interested in using cutting-edge imaging and signal processing technologies to understand language production from its cognitive conception to its biomechanical execution to its signal properties. Our group uses articulator movement tracking, real-time imaging of the vocal tract, and state-of-art movement, image, and acoustic analysis techniques, including those found in automatic speech recognition paradigms.

Our current projects include:

• spiral and echoplanar real-time vocal tract imaging for the control of vocal tract shaping during speech sound production
• the simultaneous synchronized acquisition of speech audio data with MRI data
• the magnetometer for point-tracking articulator movement at high speeds to examine the effects of linguistic structure on speech timing
• the development of analytic techniques for recovering important articulatory control parameters from image data, and an elaborated understanding of articulatory-acoustic relations via the consideration of dynamic articulatory data.
• improvements in temporal and spatial resolution, based on knowledge of the "dynamic" region.
• improvements in temporal and spatial resolution using arrays of receiver coils.

Our first movies using this novel high speed MRI technique from our original publication can be viewed here.