Signa 1.5 t scanner

Five female native speakers of American English were engaged in a simple dialog with the experimenter on topics of a general nature (e.g., “what music do you listen to …”, “tell me more about your favorite cuisine …,” etc.) to elicit spontaneous spoken responses while inside the MR scanner. For each speech “turn,” audio responses and MRI videos of vocal tract articulation were recorded for 30 seconds and time-synchronized with the audio. The same speakers were also recorded/imaged while reading TIMIT shibboleth sentences and the rainbow passage during a separate scan. The spontaneous and read speech data represent the two speaking styles considered in this study. Details regarding the recording and imaging setup can be found in [13] (link) and [16] (link). Midsagittal real-time MR images of the vocal tract were acquired with a repetition time of TR = 6.5 ms on a GE Signa 1.5 T scanner with a 13 interleaf spiral gradient echo pulse sequence. The slice thickness was approximately 3 mm. A sliding window reconstruction at a rate of 22.4 frames per second was employed. Field-of-view (FOV), which can be thought of as a zoom factor, was set depending on the subject's head size. Further details, and sample MRI movies can be found at http://sail.usc.edu/span.

Structural MR scans (voxel size 1 x 1 x 1 mm) were performed on a General Electric Signa 1.5 T scanner. The obtained T1 images were processed using default FreeSurfer (v.6.0.0) ‘recon-all’ reconstruction algorithm [62 (link)]. The results of this reconstruction were used to create the source model as described below.