Speech Prosody and Articulatory Dynamics in Spoken Language

描述（由申请人提供）：语言的一个强有力的交际方面是韵律，它是使用音高、响度、局部速率调节和停顿来表达其信息和情感内容。由于中风等神经损伤或自闭症谱系障碍引起的语言产生缺陷通常以韵律不规则为特征。本研究计划的长期目标是了解语言结构和交际语境如何影响说话过程中发音运动的时空实现。我们的语言学工程师团队在发音模式的层面上研究韵律的“特征”。本建议的具体目的是理解和建模说话者如何以不同的方式调节发音手势的时空组织，作为言语流中断的认知来源的功能，以及当说话者彼此互动时，交际语境如何影响发音中言语流的时间流。我们概述了一项研究策略，调查语言开始/停止与发音控制和协调之间的关系。除了语言结构外，言语的开始、停顿或停止可能有各种各样的原因

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): One powerfully communicative aspect of language is prosody, which is the use of pitch, loudness, local rate modulation, and pauses in speech to signal its informational and affective content. Speech production deficits due to neurological damage such as stroke or due to Autism Spectrum Disorder are often characterized by prosodic irregularities. The long term objective of the proposed research program is to understand how linguistic structure and communicative context condition the spatiotemporal realization of articulatory movement during speaking. Our linguist-engineer team studies the "signatures" of prosody at the level of articulatory patterning. The specific aims of this proposal are to understand and model how speakers differentially modulate the spatiotemporal organization of articulatory gestures as a function of the cognitive source of a break in the speech stream and how the communicative context influences the temporal flow of the speech stream in articulation as speakers interact with one another. We outline a research strategy that investigates the relation between speech initiation/cessation and the control and coordination of articulation. Speech may start, pause, or cease for a variety of reasons in addition to linguistically structured phrase edges. Some breaks in the speech stream may be cognitively "planned," such as interlocutor turn-taking in discourse. Other disruptions in the speech stream might be "unplanned," such as interruptions and word finding challenges. Our approach investigates the articulation of speech in the vocal tract at turn-taking and interruptions in structured dialogue and in the vicinity of pauses that occur for cognitive speech planning reasons. We complement this experimental work with computational modeling of phrasal junctures and pauses, and with machine learning approaches to classifying breaks in speech arising from differing sources. The specific aims will be pursued by using articulatory movement data collected with magnetometer systems for tracking movement inside the mouth and by using our team's computational model of speech production. The experiment work and the concomitant computational modeling of the articulatory findings will provide a profile of the manner in which articulatory patterning is shapd by the larger informational structuring of utterances and by the demands of speech planning in a communicative context.