X-ray GIF of a human speaking

C h r i s t i n e
E r i c s d o t t e r

Ph.D.

This is me (female subject) saying "både" ("both"). The sequence is an excerpt from a 20 second X-Ray film registred at the Danderyd Hospital in Stockholm in March 1997. Also watch a male subject saying "pion" and my big mouth


X-RAY ANALYSES OF SPEECH

PROJECT PARTICIPANTS
Peter Branderud, Hassan Djamshidpey, Christine Ericsdotter Bresin, Diana Krull, Catharina Kylander, Jaroslava Lander, Björn Lindblom, Hans-Jerker Lundberg, Johan Stark, Johan Sundberg, Ivar Wäneland

SPONSOR
HSFR (Röntgenanalyser av tal, head: Björn Lindblom)

ABSTRACT
The goal of this project is to investigate 12 speakers with the x-ray equipment at Danderyd Hospital, that is especially calibrated for synchronous registration of articulatory movements and sound [1]. Each subject is recorded for 20 seconds at 50 images per second. The x-ray films are of high quality, which facilitates the phonetic interpretation. The analysis is made frame by frame by tracing the speaker's vocal tract profile and by feeding the information from the different parts of the vocal tract profile (jaw, mandible, pharynx, tongue contour and lips) into the APEX model. At present, we are investigating how the movement of the tongue is modified when the tongue blade gestures for dental and retroflex stops interact with the tongue body motion for various VCV contexts [2, 3].

REFERENCES
[1] Branderud P, Lundberg H-J, Lander J, Djamshidpey H, Wäneland I, Krull D & Lindblom B (1998): "X-ray analyses of speech: Methodological aspects", FONETIK 98, Papers presented at the annual Swedish phonetics conference, Dept of Linguistics, Stockholm University, May 1998.

[2] Ericsdotter, C., Stark, J. & Lindblom, B. (1999): "Articulatory coordination in coronal stops: Implications for theories of coarticulation." Proceedings from the XIVth ICPhS, San Francisco, California, 1-7 August 1999.

[3] Ericsdotter, C. (1999): Modeling lingual coarticulation in coronal stops. Master Thesis in Phonetics, Department of Linguistics, Stockholm University & Deparment of Speech, Music and Hearing, Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Spring 1999.