Project Abstract/Summary
Speech is a universal form of human communication, and yet millions of Americans, young and old, have difficulties in producing speech, affecting their well-being and livelihood. Speech impairment is a common brain-related problem that can be caused by a wide range of genetic, injury-related, or degenerative brain problems. Helping people with such impairments can be difficult because speech is an incredibly complicated brain ability, often making it hard to pinpoint the source of the problem so that it can be treated. The goal of the proposed studies is to understand several key parts of the speech production system. The research uses advanced brain imaging techniques to measure the brain’s activity pattern while healthy people are performing several different speech production tasks. These investigations allow us to generate a functional “map” of the systems of the healthy brain that enable us to speak fluently. These maps can then be related to patterns of brain changes in people with speech production problems due to brain disease, allowing us to identify the source or sources of the problem, and making it possible to develop therapies to recover speech fluency.
Understanding the detailed mechanisms of how the brain transforms thoughts into speech—the overarching goal of this project—not only allows us to improve diagnosis and treatment of speech production deficits but also leads to new insights in the development of technologies for synthetic speech and language learning education. The specific goal of this project to evaluate the hypothesis that speech production planning is divided into two separable processes controlled by two distinct brain systems, one involving the coordination of pitch-related vocalization (the melodic or sing-song like quality of speech known as intonation or prosody that is often emphasized in speaking to babies) and the other involving the coordination of articulate speech (forming and sequencing phonemes, syllables, words and phrases). The practical importance of this idea is that the ability to coordinate articulate speech may be dependent on the ability to generate the pitch-related prosody of an utterance, which acts as a scaffold for speech planning. This differs from typical thinking in which prosody is an add-on ability rather than a foundation. This new perspective, if borne out by research, may fundamentally change our understanding of how speech is produced. To study this question, we use a brain imaging technique (functional magnetic resonance imaging or fMRI) to map neural circuits involved in speech production using tasks that allow us to separately measure the ability to generate pitch-related prosodic contours from the articulation of phonetic and syllabic speech content. We expect these experiments to reveal distinguishable neural circuits supporting these two speech production abilities, which opens the door to the development of diagnostic tools for evaluating speech disabilities in the clinic and better computational/synthetic models of speech production.
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.
Principal Investigator
Gregory Hickok – University of California-Irvine located in IRVINE, CA
Co-Principal Investigators
Kourosh Saberi
Funders
Funding Amount
$965,471.00
Project Start Date
08/01/2023
Project End Date
07/31/2026
Will the project remain active for the next two years?
The project has more than two years remaining
Source: National Science Foundation
Please be advised that recent changes in federal funding schemes may have impacted the project’s scope and status.
Updated: April, 2025