A Multimodal Real-Time MRI Articulatory Corpus for Speech Research.

We present MRI-TIMIT: a large-scale database of synchronized audio and real-time magnetic resonance imaging (rtMRI) data for speech research. The database currently consists of speech data acquired from two male and two female speakers of American English. Subjects’ upper airways were imaged in the midsagittal plane while reading the same 460 sentence corpus used in the MOCHA-TIMIT corpus [1]. Accompanying acoustic recordings were phonemically transcribed using forced alignment. Vocal tract tissue boundaries were automatically identified in each video frame, allowing for dynamic quantification of each speaker’s midsagittal articulation. The database and companion toolset provide a unique resource with which to examine articulatory-acoustic relationships in speech production. Index Terms: speech production, speech corpora, real-time MRI, multi-modal database, large-scale phonetic tools