welcome to span

SPAN is an interdisciplinary research team bringing together faculty and students from the Viterbi School of Engineering and the Department of Linguistics at USC with a shared interest in spoken language production: from its cognitive conception, to its biomechanical execution, to its signal properties. It was established by Prof. Shri Narayanan as a part of the Signal Analysis and Interpretation Laboratory (SAIL). The group has been pioneering the development and scientific application of real-time Magnetic Resonance Imaging of the dynamic vocal tract shaping, and making available speech production data to the research community.

In the present website, besides information about the members of the team and our downloadable publications , you will find research and educational resources we make publicly available including the real-time MRI charts and the USC-TIMIT articulatory database.

Sponsors of our work include the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, the Office of Naval Research, and the Department of Justice.