Purpose To enable dynamic speech imaging with high spatiotemporal resolution and full-vocal-tract spatial coverage, leveraging recent advances in sparse sampling. Methods An imaging method is developed to enable high-speed dynamic speech imaging exploiting low-rank and sparsity of the dynamic images of articulatory motion during speech. The proposed method includes: a) a novel data acquisition strategy that collects navigators with high temporal frame rate, and b) an image reconstruction method that derives temporal subspaces from navigators and reconstructs high-resolution images from sparsely sampled data with joint low-rank and sparsity constraints. Results The proposed method has been systematically evaluated and validated through several dynamic speech experiments. A nominal imaging speed of 102 frames per second (fps) was achieved for a single-slice imaging protocol with a spatial resolution of 2.2 × 2.2 × 6.5 mm3. An eight-slice imaging protocol covering the entire vocal tract achieved a nominal imaging speed of 12.8 fps with the identical spatial resolution. The effectiveness of the proposed method and its practical utility was also demonstrated in a phonetic investigation. Conclusion High spatiotemporal resolution with full-vocal-tract spatial coverage can be achieved for dynamic speech imaging experiments with low-rank and sparsity constraints.

When addressing their young infants, parents systematically modify their speech. Such infant-directed speech (IDS) contains exaggerated vowel formants, which have been proposed to foster language development via articulation of more distinct speech sounds. Here, this assumption is rigorously tested using both acoustic and, for the first time, fine-grained articulatory measures. Mothers were recorded speaking to their infant and to another adult, and measures were taken of their acoustic vowel space, their tongue and lip movements and the length of their vocal tract. Results showed that infant- but not adult-directed speech contains acoustically exaggerated vowels, and these are not the product of adjustments to tongue or to lip movements. Rather, they are the product of a shortened vocal tract due to a raised larynx, which can be ascribed to speakers' unconscious effort to appear smaller and more non-threatening to the young infant. This adjustment in IDS may be a vestige of early mother–infant interactions, which had as its primary purpose the transmission of non-aggressiveness and/or a primitive manifestation of pre-linguistic vocal social convergence of the mother to her infant. With the advent of human language, this vestige then acquired a secondary purpose—facilitating language acquisition via the serendipitously exaggerated vowels.

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