Speaker-independent speech inversion for recovery of velopharyngeal port constriction degreea).

For most of his illustrious career, Ken Stevens focused on examining and documenting the rich detail about vocal tract changes available to listeners underlying the acoustic signal of speech. Current approaches to speech inversion take advantage of this rich detail to recover information about articulatory movement. Our previous speech inversion work focused on movements of the tongue and lips, for which "ground truth" is readily available.

Evaluating the Use of Online Self-Report Questionnaires as Clinically Valid Mental Health Monitoring Tools in the Clinical Whitespace.

Although digital health solutions are increasingly popular in clinical psychiatry, one application that has not been fully explored is the utilization of survey technology to monitor patients outside of the clinic. Supplementing routine care with digital information collected in the "clinical whitespace" between visits could improve care for patients with severe mental illness. This study evaluated the feasibility and validity of using online self-report questionnaires to supplement in-person clinical evaluations in persons with and without psychiatric diagnoses.

Unsupervised speaker adaptation for speaker independent acoustic to articulatory speech inversion.

Speech inversion is a well-known ill-posed problem and addition of speaker differences typically makes it even harder. Normalizing the speaker differences is essential to effectively using multi-speaker articulatory data for training a speaker independent speech inversion system. This paper explores a vocal tract length normalization (VTLN) technique to transform the acoustic features of different speakers to a target speaker acoustic space such that speaker specific details are minimized.

Recognition of time-compressed speech does not predict recognition of natural fast-rate speech by older listeners.

This study investigated whether recognition of time-compressed speech predicts recognition of natural fast-rate speech, and whether this relationship is influenced by listener age. High and low context sentences were presented to younger and older normal-hearing adults at a normal speech rate, naturally fast speech rate, and fast rate implemented by time compressing the normal-rate sentences. Recognition of time-compressed sentences over-estimated recognition of natural fast sentences for both groups, especially for older listeners.

Improved vocal tract reconstruction and modeling using an image super-resolution technique.

Magnetic resonance imaging has been widely used in speech production research. Often only one image stack (sagittal, axial, or coronal) is used for vocal tract modeling. As a result, complementary information from other available stacks is not utilized.