Abstract
Medical Ultrasonography (US) can be useful for analysing movements inside the mouth during speech. CT and MRI scans may provide more detailed information of the anatomical gestures, but the lightness, speed, portability, and safety of US offer advantages to the phonetician. This paper describes the techniques and data of US scans with respect to phonetics research, and describes the gestures that are associated with the phonemes of Japanese speech. In addition, we propose the use of image-processing techniques for deriving a laryngeal elevation index (LEI) from the US data, to provide a contour which can be used to reveal prosodic information.
