CASE SPEECH PRODUCTION LAB

   The activities of the lab are interdisciplinary and involve two major projects: the first project focuses on the investigation of motor control mechanisms in speech production, by analysis of articulatory trackings obtained by X-ray microbeam recordings and by electromagnetic articulography (EMA) recordings. The X-ray microbeam data were recorded at the X-ray Microbeam Center (University of Wisconsin) and the EMA data have been obtained by the 2D Electro-Magnetic Articulograph available in the CSPL Lab. The project investigates temporal coordination among articulatory gestures within the syllable, for applications to analysis of disruption of speech motor control in Childhood Apraxia of Speech (CAS) and in articulatory disorders (AD).

  This project is realized in collaboration with Dr. Barbara Lewis, Department of Communication Sciences, as an extension of her developmental analysis of speech errors in CAS by English children. The present study performs acoustic and articulatory analyses of CAS and AD children's errors, cross-linguistically. Italian data have been analyzed and compared with the English data. This part of the project is realized in collaboration with Dr. Donatella Tomaiuoli, Director of the Centro Ricerca e Cura Balbuzie e Disturbi della Voce e del Linguaggio (Center for Research and Therapy for Fluency, Voice and Speech Disorders, or CRC), Rome, Italy, and with the CRC staff, who collected and provided the Italian speech samples.

   The second project consists in an analysis of multi-level prosodic contours by means of the Superposition of Functional Contours (SFC) trainable prosodic model (Bailly and Holm, 2005), (this project is realized in collaboration with Dr. Bailly, director of GIPSA-Lab and of the Speech & Cognition Department at ICP, Grénoble, France). The sentences in the corpus have been analysed by the STEMMA model for semio-syntactic parsing (Brandt, 1999, 2004). The stylized prosodic contours resulting from this analysis will be used for automatic prosody stylization in synthesized speech (this project is realized in collaboration with Prof. Brandt, Department of Cognitive Sciences, in the Laboratory for Applied Research in Cognitive Semiotics).