Dual Speech Coordination: fMRI Investigations of a New Neuroarchitectural Model of Speech Production

双语音协调：语音产生的新神经结构模型的功能磁共振成像研究

• 批准号: 2242080
• 负责人: Gregory Hickok
• 金额: $ 96.55万
• 依托单位: University of California-Irvine
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2023
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2023-08-01 至 2026-07-31
• 项目状态: 未结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=2242080&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Dual; Speech; Coordination; fMRI; Investigations

Speech is a universal form of human communication, and yet millions of Americans, young and old, have difficulties in producing speech, affecting their well-being and livelihood. Speech impairment is a common brain-related problem that can be caused by a wide range of genetic, injury-related, or degenerative brain problems. Helping people with such impairments can be difficult because speech is an incredibly complicated brain ability, often making it hard to pinpoint the source of the problem so that it can be treated. The goal of the proposed studies is to understand several key parts of the speech production system. The research uses advanced brain imaging techniques to measure the brain’s activity pattern while healthy people are performing several different speech production tasks. These investigations allow us to generate a functional “map” of the systems of the healthy brain that enable us to speak fluently. These maps can then be related to patterns of brain changes in people with speech production problems due to brain disease, allowing us to identify the source or sources of the problem, and making it possible to develop therapies to recover speech fluency. Understanding the detailed mechanisms of how the brain transforms thoughts into speech—the overarching goal of this project—not only allows us to improve diagnosis and treatment of speech production deficits but also leads to new insights in the development of technologies for synthetic speech and language learning education. The specific goal of this project to evaluate the hypothesis that speech production planning is divided into two separable processes controlled by two distinct brain systems, one involving the coordination of pitch-related vocalization (the melodic or sing-song like quality of speech known as intonation or prosody that is often emphasized in speaking to babies) and the other involving the coordination of articulate speech (forming and sequencing phonemes, syllables, words and phrases). The practical importance of this idea is that the ability to coordinate articulate speech may be dependent on the ability to generate the pitch-related prosody of an utterance, which acts as a scaffold for speech planning. This differs from typical thinking in which prosody is an add-on ability rather than a foundation. This new perspective, if borne out by research, may fundamentally change our understanding of how speech is produced. To study this question, we use a brain imaging technique (functional magnetic resonance imaging or fMRI) to map neural circuits involved in speech production using tasks that allow us to separately measure the ability to generate pitch-related prosodic contours from the articulation of phonetic and syllabic speech content. We expect these experiments to reveal distinguishable neural circuits supporting these two speech production abilities, which opens the door to the development of diagnostic tools for evaluating speech disabilities in the clinic and better computational/synthetic models of speech production.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.

言语是人类交流的一种普遍形式，但数百万美国人，无论老少，都有言语困难，影响了他们的福祉和生计。语言障碍是一种常见的大脑相关问题，可能由广泛的遗传，损伤相关或退行性大脑问题引起。帮助有这种障碍的人可能很困难，因为语言是一种非常复杂的大脑能力，通常很难确定问题的根源，以便进行治疗。这些研究的目的是了解语音产生系统的几个关键部分。这项研究使用先进的大脑成像技术来测量健康人在执行几种不同的语音产生任务时的大脑活动模式。这些研究使我们能够生成健康大脑系统的功能“地图”，使我们能够流利地说话。然后，这些地图可以与由于大脑疾病而导致语言产生问题的人的大脑变化模式相关联，使我们能够识别问题的来源，并使开发恢复语言流畅性的疗法成为可能。 了解大脑如何将思想转化为语言的详细机制-该项目的总体目标-不仅使我们能够改善语音产生缺陷的诊断和治疗，而且还可以为合成语音和语言学习教育技术的发展带来新的见解。这个项目的具体目标是评估一个假设，即言语产生计划分为两个可分离的过程，由两个不同的大脑系统控制，一个涉及与音高相关的发声的协调（对婴儿说话时经常强调的音调或韵律）和另一个涉及发音的协调（形成和排序音素、音节、单词和短语）。这个想法的实际重要性在于，协调清晰语音的能力可能取决于生成话语的音高相关韵律的能力，这可以作为语音规划的支架。这与典型的思维方式不同，在这种思维方式中，韵律是一种附加能力，而不是基础。这种新的观点，如果得到研究的证实，可能会从根本上改变我们对语言是如何产生的理解。为了研究这个问题，我们使用脑成像技术（功能性磁共振成像或fMRI）来映射参与语音产生的神经回路，这些神经回路使用任务，使我们能够分别测量从语音和音节语音内容的清晰度生成音高相关韵律轮廓的能力。我们希望这些实验能够揭示支持这两种言语产生能力的可区分的神经回路，从而为临床上评估言语障碍的诊断工具的开发和更好的言语产生计算/合成模型打开大门。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并被认为值得通过使用基金会的智力价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估来支持。