A multimodal real-time MRI articulatory corpus for speech research
Shrikanth S. Narayanan, Erik Bresch, Prasanta Ghosh, Louis Goldstein, Athanasios Katsamanis, Yoon Hee Kim, Adam C. Lammert, Michael Proctor, Vikram Ramanarayanan, Yinghua Zhu · 2011
We present MRI-TIMIT: a large-scale database of synchronized audio and real-time magnetic resonance imaging (rtMRI) data for speech research. The database currently consists of speech data acquired from two male and two female speakers of Amer-ican English. Subjects ’ upper airways were imaged in the mid-sagittal plane while reading the same 460 sentence corpus used in the MOCHA-TIMIT corpus [1]. Accompanying acoustic recordings were phonemically transcribed using forced align-ment. Vocal tract tissue boundaries were automatically identi-fied in each video frame, allowing for dynamic quantification of each speaker’s midsagittal articulation. The database and com-panion toolset provide a unique resource with which to examine articulatory-acoustic relationships in speech production. Index Terms: speech production, speech corpora, real-time MRI, multi-modal database, large-scale phonetic tools