Lakshminarayanan A V, Lee S, McCutcheon M J
Department of Radiology, University of Alabama, Birmingham 35294.
J Magn Reson Imaging. 1991 Jan-Feb;1(1):71-6. doi: 10.1002/jmri.1880010109.
Modeling of vocal tract behavior during speech production requires accurate measurements of the entire vocal tract. To accomplish this, magnetic resonance (MR) imaging was performed on a 0.5-T system with a custom-made, double-loop, wrap-around coil. A midsagittal section of the region from the glottis to the lips was imaged during sustained production of five American English vowels. A gradient-spoiled gradient-echo sequence was used to achieve a 4-second imaging time. Images showed clear profiles of the entire vocal tract and exhibited essential articulatory features of vowel production. It was possible to measure midsagittal widths at various points along the vocal tract with 1-mm resolution. The measurements were used to construct a tube model for prediction of the acoustic output of the vocal tract. It is concluded that risk-free MR imaging promises to be an important means of acquiring data for vocal tract modeling, with applications to speech pathology, linguistics, and artificial speech.
言语产生过程中声道行为的建模需要对整个声道进行精确测量。为实现这一点，在一台0.5-T系统上使用定制的双环环绕线圈进行了磁共振（MR）成像。在持续发出五个美式英语元音时，对从声门到嘴唇区域的正中矢状面进行了成像。使用梯度回波扰相序列实现了4秒的成像时间。图像显示了整个声道的清晰轮廓，并展现了元音产生的基本发音特征。能够以1毫米的分辨率测量沿声道各个点的正中矢状宽度。这些测量结果被用于构建一个管模型，以预测声道的声学输出。得出的结论是，无风险的MR成像有望成为获取声道建模数据的重要手段，可应用于言语病理学、语言学和人工语音领域。
