1An MRI study of articulatory settings of L1 and L2 speakers of American English

In this paper, we analyze the “articulatory setting” or “basis of articulation ” of both L1 and L2 speak-ers of American English and investigate possible articulation parameters for its control within the framework of Task Dynamics [1]. More specifically, we extend methods and results presented in [2] to the case of native German, Hindi and Tamil speakers producing L2 English. We use audio-synchronized real-time magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) tech-nology [3] to record all speakers while they pro-duced sentences or paragraphs in the MRI scanner. We further describe the automatic extraction of measures to capture the vocal tract posture during unfilled pause intervals as well as at absolute rest