The speech inverse problem focuses on retrieving the best articulatory vectors for the task of synthesizing a target voice signal. In this research the problem is approached from a neuromotor level, and by means of some machine learning techniques. Specifically, speech articulators are represented on the midsagittal plane, and controlled by muscular activations grouped in the articulatory vecto...

BACKGROUND The purpose of this study was to describe the impact of partial lateral glossectomy on midsagittal tongue movement during speech. METHODS Using B-mode ultrasound, the midsagittal tongue movement of 10 patients with lateral partial glossectomy during a standardized reading passage was analyzed before and after surgery. Six normal adults served as control speakers. The main outcome m...

i A normalization procedure was tested in which the vocal tract length and the functions determining the conversion of midsagittal distance to cross-sectional area in an articulstory synthesizer were adjusted until there was an acoustic match between the articulator synthesizer and a human over a selected set of vowels. Another part of the normalization procedure was to train neural networks to...

In order to achieve better understanding of the articulatory-acoustic relationships, more data are still very much needed. The two-fold aim of the present study was thus (1) to provide a set of coherent midsagittal functions, area functions and formant frequencies, for a small corpus of vowels and fricative consonants produced by one subject, and (2) to derive a midsagittal profile to area func...

OBJECTIVE Radiographic frontal recess and sinus anatomic measurements were obtained to evaluate the feasibility of the endoscopic modified Lothrop procedure. STUDY DESIGN Computed tomography anatomic study. MATERIALS AND METHODS Computed tomography (CT) scans from 97 patients, 39 male and 58 female, were analyzed in the sagittal plane. Four anatomic parameters were measured 1) midsagittal t...

Tongue surface measurements from midsagittal ultrasound scans are effectively arcs with deviations representing tongue shape, but smoothing-spline analysis of variances (SSANOVAs) assume variance around a horizontal line. Therefore, calculating SSANOVA average curves of tongue traces in Cartesian Coordinates [Davidson, J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 120(1), 407-415 (2006)] creates errors that are compound...

We assessed whether instrumentally-learned pressor responses inhibit electrocortical activity, as predicted by learning theories of idiopathic hypertension. Subjects received beat-by-beat feedback for increases and decreases in mean arterial pressure measured from the finger (Peñáz method). Slow potentials were recorded from the midsagittal line during the final training session. Also recorded ...

Neuropathological and neuroimaging studies show cortical and subcortical volume loss in alcohol-dependent individuals. Using quantitative magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and proton magnetic resonance spectroscopic imaging ((1)H MRSI), we studied the size and potential cellular injury of the brainstem in untreated heavy alcohol drinkers. The brainstem is considered critical in the development a...

The following contribution addresses several issues concerning speech degrees of freedom in French oral vowels, stop, and fricative consonants based on an analysis of tongue and lip shapes extracted from cineradio- and labio-films. The midsagittal tongue shapes have been submitted to a linear decomposition where some of the loading factors were selected such as jaw and larynx position while fou...