Construction of Neuro-physiologically Control Model for Speech Production Process

The purpose of this study is to build up a neurophysiological control model for speech production process. Based on the common and individual characteristics of speech organs, we developed an efficient model construction approach by adapting the characteristics to a prototypical articulatory model for any given speaker, and proposed an estimation method of muscle activation patterns by reducing spatial-dependent properties of the articulatory muscles. To acquire “true” articulatory motor commands, we proposed a learning method that can reduce the effects of exiting speech category by practicing the articulatory movements alone without auditory representation beforehand. We analyzed brain activities for variety of reading words using source reconstruction method based on EEG observations. It is found that the speech processing in the brain can be explained by the dual-stream model. Based on our findings, we constructed a neurophysiological control model for speech production.