Welcome to SPAN

SPAN is an interdisciplinary research team bringing together faculty and students from the Viterbi School of Engineering, the Department of Linguistics at USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences, and the Keck School of Medicine at USC with a shared interest in vocal production of speech, spoken language, and beyond: from its cognitive conception, to its biomechanical execution, to its signal properties. SPAN's research includes the study of human communication and interaction across the life span including during development, across languages, and under conditions challenged by illness, disorder or disease. SPAN was established by Prof. Shri Narayanan as a part of the Signal Analysis and Interpretation Laboratory (SAIL). The group has been pioneering the development and scientific application of real-time Magnetic Resonance Imaging of the dynamic vocal tract shaping in the USC Dynamic Imaging Science Center (DISC), and making available speech production datasets and educational resources to the research community.

In this website, in addition to information about the members of the team and our downloadable publications, you will find research and teaching resources we make publicly available including the real-time MRI charts and the USC-TIMIT articulatory database.

Sponsors of our work include or have included the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the National Science Foundation (NSF), the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the Office of Naval Research, and the Department of Justice.