Articulatory movement visualization can be an effective aid for second language learners and individuals with hearing impairments, who may struggle to acquire accurate pronunciation using auditory information alone. However, direct articulatory measurement involves high financial costs. This study explores an alternative approach: presenting estimated articulatory movements using Acoustic-to-Articulatory Inversion (AAI) from real-timeMRI (rtMRI) movies. We investigated whether viewing these estimated rtMRI movies facilitates the learning of tongue movement patterns. Ten native Japanese speakers participated in the experiment, with five assigned to an experimental group (EXP) and five to a control group (CTR). The EXP group completed a 10-min training task with rtMRI-based visual feedback, while the CTR group trained without it. Participants were instructed to move their tongues to match a target tongue posture shown in an illustration. Speech was recorded before and after training, and tongue movement changes were assessed via formant analysis. After training, more participants in the EXP group than in the CTR group were able to move their tongues as instructed. The EXP group also showed a significant increase in the standard deviation of the second formant (t = −2.363, p 0.05), suggesting an expanded range of tongue movement. Future work will aim to refine the feedback to better support articulatory learning.
Oura et al. (Wed,) studied this question.