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A new technique for representing speech articulation with
an ultrasound-driven finite element model of the tongue is
presented. By using a snake contour extraction algorithm
with anatomically motivated constraints and a common
coordinate system between the ultrasound and the tongue
model, it is possible for the first time to obtain a realistic 3D
simulation of the tongue directly from a non-invasive sensor
(ultrasound), without mapping through any intermediate
sensor modalities, and at near real-time frame rates.

The present study investigated production and perception of focus in L2 Mandarin of Qiang speakers. Three target sentences were uttered under four focus conditions, i.e., initial, medial, final and neutral focus by 10 Qiang-Mandarin speakers. Systematic acoustic analysis showed that: (1) In Qiang-Mandarin, on-focus words exhibit significant F0 rising, intensity increasing and duration lengthening. There is no Post-focus Compression (PFC). The duration of pre-focus and post-focus words remains largely intact.

This paper conducted an interface research on rhetorical and prosodic aspects of Chinese reading discourses within the Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST) framework. Ten discourses in 3 genres (Commentary, Narrative, and Descriptive) from the Annotated Speech Corpus of Chinese Discourse (ASCCD) were diagrammed in RST. The recordings from 5 males and 5 females were annotated and further analyzed acoustically and statistically by applying Praat and R.

The bilateral cavities of the piriform fossa are the side branches of the vocal tract and produce anti-resonance(s) in the transfer function. This effect has been known for male vocal tracts, but female data were few. This study investigates contributions of the piriform fossa to vowel spectra in female vocal tracts by means of MRI-based vocal-tract modeling and acoustic experiment with the water-filling technique. Results from three female subjects indicate that the piriform fossa generates one or two dips in the frequency region of 4-6 kHz.

This study examines the acoustic effect of the laryngeal cavity of female speakers on the higher vowel spectra. To do so, MRI data of vowels /a/ and /i/ obtained from three female speakers were analyzed with data from a male speaker as reference. 3D vocal-tract shapes were extracted from the MRI data and printed as solid mechanical models. Transfer functions of the models' vocal tracts were estimated by a transmission line model. Individual variations of the laryngeal cavity were described by the area functions of the cavity.

Assuming that linguistic specifications and information
planning contribute to different levels of prosodic organization
that cumulatively constitute output prosody, quantitative
analysis of respective contributions can be derived through
normalization procedures that remove levels of interactions
involved. The current study attempts to account for how L2
prosody departs from the L1 norm in the two levels mentioned
and whether an account can be offered. F0 patterns of word
English stress categories (primary, secondary and tertiary) and