Analysis of articulatory setting for L1 and L2 English speakers using MRI data

This paper investigates the extent to which the geographical region (country) where a speaker acquired their English language affects the articulatory setting in their speech. To obtain accurate measurements for evaluating articulatory setting, we utilized a large real-time MRI corpus of vocal tract articulation. The corpus was obtained from speakers from a variety of linguistic backgrounds producing continuous English speech. We use an automated pipeline to process and extract articulatory positional information from the MRI video data. This data is used to draw comparisons between English language speakers from the United States and speakers who acquired their English in India, Korea, and China. Analysis of the speaker groups reveals statistically significant articulatory setting posture differences in multiple places of articulation.