Magnetic resonance imaging of the brain and vocal tract:Applications to the study of speech production and language learning

The human vocal system is highly plastic, allowing for the flexible expression of language, mood and intentions. However, this plasticity is not stable throughout the life span, and it is well documented that adult learners encounter greater difficulty than children in acquiring the sounds of foreign languages. Researchers have used magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to interrogate the neural substrates of vocal imitation and learning, and the correlates of individual differences in phonetic “talent”. In parallel, a growing body of work using MR technology to directly image the vocal tract in real time during speech has offered primarily descriptive accounts of phonetic variation within and across languages. In this paper, we review the contribution of neural MRI to our understanding of vocal learning, and give an overview of vocal tract imaging and its potential to inform the field. We propose methods by which our understanding of speech production and learning could be advanced through the combined measurement of articulation and brain activity using MRI – specifically, we describe a novel paradigm, developed in our laboratory, that uses both MRI techniques to for the first time map directly between neural, articulatory and acoustic data in the investigation of vocalisation. This non-invasive, multimodal imaging method could be used to track central and peripheral correlates of spoken language learning, and speech recovery in clinical settings, as well as provide insights into potential sites for targeted neural interventions

Framework for the development of articulatory characterization studies over mri images

En este artículo se presenta un marco de trabajo tecnológico innovador diseñado y desarrollado por nuestro grupo de investigación para posibilitar la realización de estudios de caracterización articulatoria de los sonidos de una lengua a partir de medidas tomadas sobre secuencias de imágenes de cine-MRI. Como elemento fundamental se tiene la herramienta software de producción propia DicomPas, que permite realizar la toma de medidas de parámetros articulatorios sobre las secuencias de imágenes MRI y la ejecución de algoritmos ad hoc sobre dichas medidas, de cara al procesamiento de los datos, con vistas a la posterior extracción del conocimiento, en forma de generación de inferencias estadísticas o de inteligencia artificial. En estos momentos este marco de trabajo está siendo aplicado a la realización de diversos estudios en euskara y español de Euskadi, disponiéndose para ello de una base de datos con dos repositorios de imágenes tomadas en el plano medio sagital, correspondientes a 18 informantes diferentes.In this paper an innovative framework is presented, designed and developed by our research team to enable the accomplishment of research works concerning the articulatory characterization of the sounds of a language from measures taken over MRI image sequences. As fundamental element there is the DicomPas software tool, developed by our team, which allows to carry out the measures of articulatory parameters over the MRI image sequences and the execution of ad hoc algorithms over such measures, facing the data processing, with the view to the subsequent extraction of knowledge, in the form of the generation of statistical or artificial intelligence inferences. This framework is currently being applied to the achievement of diverse studies in Basque and Spanish of the Basque Country. To do so, a database with two repositories of images taken in the midsagittal plane, corresponding to 18 different informants, is available