Seeing Speech: Capturing Vocal Tract Shaping Using Real-Time Magnetic Resonance Imaging

U nderstanding human speech production is of great interest from engineering, linguistic, and several other research points of view. While several types of data available to speech understanding studies lead to different avenues for research, in this article we focus on real-time (RT) magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) as an emerging technique for studying speech production. We discuss the details and challenges of RT magnetic resonance (MR) acquisition and analysis, and modeling approaches that make use of MRI data for studying speech production.