Obtaining a palatal trace for ultrasound images

This paper presents methods for collection and display of the palate with ultrasound, for use as a reference for tongue movements. Ultrasound does not usually capture structures other than the tongue, because the air above the tongue in the vocal tract reflects the ultrasound beam back to the transducer. However, when the tongue touches the palate, the ultrasound beam is transmitted through the soft tissue until it reaches and is reflected by the palatine bone. The tongue touches the palate during swallowing and some speech sounds. The palate contour can be traced from these images. The paper presents a corpus of speech and swallowing tasks that can be used to create a full palatal trace. The corpus is tested on a subject for whom it is easy to collect palatal images and a subject for whom it is difficult to collect palatal images. The availability of a palate will enhance our ability for data quantification from ultrasound images. In combination with tongue contours, the palate contour allows the computation of linguistically important measures, such as the constriction degree, area functions, and L2 norms. Work supported by NIH RO1-DC01758 and T32-DE07309.