1997 — 2001 |
Byrd, Dani |
R29Activity Code Description: Undocumented code - click on the grant title for more information. |
Articulatory Timing--Organizing Syllables and Phrases @ Haskins Laboratories, Inc.
The focus of the proposed research program is to understand how linguistic structure above the level of the segment conditions the temporal realization of speech. Specifically, the articulatory patterning of syllables and phrases--prosodic structure--is considered. This program will investigate the temporal coordination and cohesion of oral articulatory gestures as a function of their syllabic and phrasal positions. A series of experiments, using articulatory movement data collected with a magnetometer system, are described. These experiments fall into three areas: the timing between gestures in syllable margins (initial vs. Final) and in syllable nuclei; the influence of hierarchical phrasal structure on intergestural timing; and the manner in which prosodic structure induces segmental alternations, that is, apparent substitutions of one segment for another. These experiments will provide a profile of the way in which articulatory coordination among multiple gestures is shaped by positional contexts, ultimately with the hope of defining general "signatures" of prosodic structure on articulatory organization.
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2002 — 2010 |
Byrd, Dani |
R01Activity Code Description: To support a discrete, specified, circumscribed project to be performed by the named investigator(s) in an area representing his or her specific interest and competencies. |
Prosody and Articulatory Dynamics in Spoken Language @ University of Southern California
[unreadable] DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): As research in speech production becomes more integrated with linguistic theory, it has become increasingly clear that segmental articulation cannot be understood independently of prosodic structure; such structure includes, but is not limited to, accent and phrasal organization. These high-level prosodic aspects of language pervade low-level articulatory behavior. Despite the pervasiveness of these effects, only a very few prosodic signatures have been identified at the level of articulatory patterning. The long term objective of the proposed research program is to understand how linguistic structure conditions the spatiotemporal realization of speech. Specifically, we investigate the relation between one aspect of prosodic structure -- phrasal structure -- and the control and coordination of articulation within a dynamical systems model of speech production. We adopt a three-pronged approach: experimental, theoretical, and computational. Experiments using articulatory kinematic data and concomitant computational modeling of their results will provide a profile of the manner in which patterning of articulatory gestures is shaped by prosodic context. Understanding the organization of these units of speech production as a function of the informational composition of utterances is critical to developing a unified account of the how abstract linguistic structure is communicated in spoken language. Hence, the research program will provide valuable insight into disorders, such as apraxia, that affect language production at the articulatory level, and it will contribute to a better understanding of prosody for speech recognition and synthesis purposes, also of importance to those with communication disorders.
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2012 — 2016 |
Byrd, Dani |
R01Activity Code Description: To support a discrete, specified, circumscribed project to be performed by the named investigator(s) in an area representing his or her specific interest and competencies. |
Speech Prosody and Articulatory Dynamics in Spoken Language @ University of Southern California
DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): One powerfully communicative aspect of language is prosody, which is the use of pitch, loudness, local rate modulation, and pauses in speech to signal its informational and affective content. Speech production deficits due to neurological damage such as stroke or due to Autism Spectrum Disorder are often characterized by prosodic irregularities. The long term objective of the proposed research program is to understand how linguistic structure and communicative context condition the spatiotemporal realization of articulatory movement during speaking. Our linguist-engineer team studies the signatures of prosody at the level of articulatory patterning. The specific aims of this proposal are to understand and model how speakers differentially modulate the spatiotemporal organization of articulatory gestures as a function of the cognitive source of a break in the speech stream and how the communicative context influences the temporal flow of the speech stream in articulation as speakers interact with one another. We outline a research strategy that investigates the relation between speech initiation/cessation and the control and coordination of articulation. Speech may start, pause, or cease for a variety of reasons in addition to linguistically structured phrase edges. Some breaks in the speech stream may be cognitively planned, such as interlocutor turn-taking in discourse. Other disruptions in the speech stream might be unplanned, such as interruptions and word finding challenges. Our approach investigates the articulation of speech in the vocal tract at turn-taking and interruptions in structured dialogue and in the vicinity of pauses that occur for cognitive speech planning reasons. We complement this experimental work with computational modeling of phrasal junctures and pauses, and with machine learning approaches to classifying breaks in speech arising from differing sources. The specific aims will be pursued by using articulatory movement data collected with magnetometer systems for tracking movement inside the mouth and by using our team's computational model of speech production. The experiment work and the concomitant computational modeling of the articulatory findings will provide a profile of the manner in which articulatory patterning is shapd by the larger informational structuring of utterances and by the demands of speech planning in a communicative context. PUBLIC HEALTH RELEVANCE: One powerfully communicative aspect of language is prosody, which is the use of pitch, loudness, and temporal properties such as pauses in speech to signal its informational and affective content. Speech production deficits due to neurological damage such as stroke or due to Autism Spectrum Disorder are often characterized by prosodic irregularities and understanding the influence of structural prosody and its deployment in communication on the temporal flow of speech can have critical translational impact in that disfluencies are typically used as a basis for diagnosis of speech disorders. Our research uses instrumental tracking of articulatory movements during speech to provide an understanding of normative production of modulation and pauses in speech flow that could support evidence-driven assessments and treatments of prosodic breakdown in clinical populations, including deploying assistive technologies for the impaired such as automatic speech recognition and machine speech synthesis.
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2018 — 2023 |
Iskarous, Khalil Byrd, Dani Nayak, Krishna [⬀] Haldar, Justin Narayanan, Shrikanth (co-PI) [⬀] |
N/AActivity Code Description: No activity code was retrieved: click on the grant title for more information |
Mri: Development of a High-Performance Low-Field Mri For Dynamic Imaging @ University of Southern California
This project features the development of a novel, high-performance, low-field Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) system. The system is designed to enable groundbreaking research in imaging technology, as well as in the science and technology of human spoken communication and the science of sleep, that is not possible with any conventional MRI configuration. The work includes developing signal processing methods for MRI that enable rapid imaging in low signal-to-noise ratio environments. This will alleviate artifacts that occur at air-tissue interfaces, which will make it possible to track tissue boundaries with high precision during dynamic imaging studies, particularly those adjacent to air space such as the tongue, velum, and pharyngeal airway, which are not easily accessible by other instrumentation. The new MRI system will also have a much lower level of acoustic noise than conventional systems, making it possible to perform real-time conversational speech studies and studies during natural sleep. It is anticipated that the new system will advance the field of speech research, by enabling direct investigation of the dynamic human vocal tract during communication, and will support innovative research in speech technology.
Dynamic imaging research is deeply multidisciplinary and connects computational and informational sciences with physics, biology, linguistics, communication, and engineering. The deployment of a novel magnet dedicated to dynamic imaging on the host campus represents a contribution to infrastructure for research and teaching. Data from the new MRI system will be used in a course that teaches basic physical reasoning and quantitative thinking by using theoretical and empirical descriptions of the physical mechanisms of speech. The course uses dynamic MRI data to allow students to understand speech production of vowels and consonants. The new system will allow for data of higher quality and, for the first time, acoustic recording of analyzable speech audio.
This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
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2021 — 2022 |
Byrd, Dani Oh, Miran |
N/AActivity Code Description: No activity code was retrieved: click on the grant title for more information |
Doctoral Dissertation Research: Articulatory Dynamics and Stability of Multi-Gesture Complexes @ University of Southern California
This award is funded in whole or in part under the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 (Public Law 117-2).
Spoken language production involves combined and coordinated articulatory actions of the tongue, lips, nasal port, and larynx; yet the natural variation in speech and the difficulty of "seeing" events occurring inside the human vocal tract mean that the elegant choreography of these articulatory events critical to the formation of spoken words remains mysterious. This project is a study of speech production using real-time Magnetic Resonance Imaging (rtMRI)—a technique that can image vocal tract movement during speech. The project's goal is to characterize the dynamics of articulatory actions as they are organized into coordinated complexes such as speech segments (roughly ‘alphabetic-sized’ units). The investigation of stabilities in coordination will help scientists understand the cognitive representation of the linguistic units that are used to structure and say the words we know. Ultimately such an understanding has implications for language in breakdown (e.g., due to stoke or disease), for language acquisition, for language and dialect diversity, and for technologies that synthesize and recognize human speech.
This dissertation undertakes real-time MRI experiments on speech production and concomitant computational modeling to examine how the smallest movement 'atoms' of speech segments are systematically coordinated. The project tests the hypothesis that vocal tract movements composing a segmental unit are tightly coordinated with one another. Therefore, their coordination is predicted to be stable across natural contextual variations in speech such as phrase boundaries and emphasis, unlike other movement sequences spanning across segments, which have been shown to exhibit more plastic coordination. Using data from two under-studied languages, both larynx-oral coordination in glottalic consonants and velum-oral coordination in nasal consonants are dynamically imaged, and vocal tract movements are tracked to analyze articulatory patterning and coordination in space and time. Empirical findings are computationally assessed using a model of dynamical coupling with which degrees of stability can emerge from certain coupling structures. The project seeks to incorporate coordination relations into linguistic cognitive representations and thereby illuminate the dynamic and emergent nature of speech segments in the encoding system of the phonological units that form words.
This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
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