CASE SPEECH PRODUCTION LAB

The activities of the lab are interdisciplinary and involve three 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 recordings. The x-ray microbeam data are recorded at the X-Ray Microbeam Center (University of Wisconsin) and the EMA data will soon be obtained in CSPL on the coming 2-D Electro-Magnetic Articulograph. The research aims at providing a better understanding of the invariant properties of speech gestures and of their timing characteristics, relative to all concurrent articulatory movements composing a phonetic gesture and a demisyllable, according to hypotheses on gesture coordination based on the Converter/Distributor model by Prof. Fujimura (IIAS, Kyoto, Japan). The results of this research will be applied to the realization of a biomechanical model of the vocal tract with a neural control component, to test patterns of motor control of articulatory gestures (realized in collaboration with Prof. Tyler (LINNIS, Department of Biomedical Engineering at Case) and Prof. Sanguineti (Laboratorium, Department of Communication, Computer and System Sciences, University of Genoa, Italy).

The second project aims at defining the acoustic characteristics of speech errors produced by apraxic children recorded at three developmental stages, from childhood to adolescence within a longitudinal study on genetic influences on speech disorders. The goal of the study is to provide new data to support specific characterization of Childhood Apraxia of Speech: in fact, many participants are diagnosed differently in childhood (e.g. with apraxia) and in adolescence (e.g. with dysarthria).  The audio material has been provided by Prof. Lewis (Department of Pediatrics, School of Medicine at Case)

The third project concerns the implementation of the STEMMA model for semio-syntactic analysis of sentences in multiple languages (Brandt, 1999, 2004). The model is designed as a component of the text processing module of a speech synthesizer, and will be used to derive correct prosodic contours for synthesized speech (the project is realized in collaboration with Prof. Brandt, Department of Cognitive Sciences, in the new Laboratory for Applied Research in Cognitive Semiotics and Center for Cognition and Culture).