This conference, to be held in Providence, RI, in June, 2020, will bring experts and students together to explore the progress in new and innovative approaches to the measurement and analyses of the way in which speech is organized at the physical level. Iterations of the International Seminar on Speech Production (ISSP) have taken place at three or four year intervals for the past 31 years with the aim of providing an interdisciplinary forum for researchers working on all aspects of speech production from fields as diverse as phonology, phonetics, prosody, mechanics, acoustics, physiology, motor control, neuroscience, speech technology and human interaction. The conference series has been held throughout the world, and was last in the US in 1993. Each meeting has attracted a substantial portion of the active researchers in this important yet challenging area of speech research. The current project will allow attendance by 10 students at the conference, with special events and one-on-one meetings with selected senior researchers. Keeping up with the latest in technology and theory is greatly facilitated by an international meeting such as this one, and it provides students with an especially useful entry into the field.
Speech is of critical importance to human communication, and the mechanisms used to produce it are complex and difficult to quantify. Visible articulators such as the lips and chin (related to jaw height) are relatively easy to assess, but their accurate measurement is difficult. Video images can certainly show aspects of the visible articulators, but the nonlinear compression of the 3D face into a 2D video image makes measurement unreliable, and generally more sophisticated devices are used. Modern technology, such as ultrasound and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), allow a more detailed look at the tongue, which, despite being a major component of speech production, is quite difficult to measure. These advances in data collection have begun to feed into improved models of speech motor control. The 8 keynote speakers at the conference will highlight the wide range of relevant topics, from neuroscience to disordered speech, from acquisition of speech to aging, from the technology of measurement to the influence of measurement on consumer technology. In short, the conference is an excellent showcase for the range and impact of speech production research.
This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
