Speaker
Description
Very little work has been done on functional imaging of the cranial nerve nuclei in the brainstem in the context of motor control, including only one such study of phonation (Smith et al., 2025, doi:10.21437/Interspeech.2025-2444). That study presented preliminary results from 4 participants, using two candidate data collection protocols and demonstrating that differential brainstem activation patterns could successfully be elicited from sustained [i:] and [a:] vowels, with a potential to localize activations around relevant cranial nerve nuclei. For this presentation, we will present a larger dataset (N=6, including 4 new participants), all using the selected protocol. Furthermore, we report progress toward Region Of Interest (ROI) analysis based on anatomical localization of the relevant cranial nerve nuclei.