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3 images of vocal tract, and three graphs showing fluency
Vocal tract imaging: during fluency

Congratulations to the INSTEP team (Charlie Wiltshire, Jen Chesters, Mairéad MacSweeney, Kate Watkins and physics collaborator Mark Chiew) whose paper was selected as the winner of the Editor's award in the Speech section of the Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research.  The paper, Speech Movement Variability in People Who Stutter: A Vocal Tract Magnetic Resonance Imaging Study, will carry the "Editor's Award" icon in perpetuity on the ASHAWire platform.

An Editor's Award is truly a high honour, with selection limited to the most impactful works that meet the highest quality standards in research design and presentation. The award will be formally presented during the Researcher-Academic Town Meeting (RATM) at the 2022 ASHA Convention in New Orleans, Louisiana, USA.

Senior author Kate Watkins, Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience, said, "Using real-time MRI, we can see the exquisite movements of all the different parts of the vocal tract while someone is speaking inside the scanner. This allows us to see what happens when people who stutter produce speech that sounds fluent and when they stutter. We are grateful to our participants who volunteered for this study and to the people at OHBA and WIN who helped with scanning.  We also thank the Editor-in-Chief and editors of the Speech section of JSLHR at ASHA Journals for this recognition."

Read the paper at https://doi.org/10.1044/2021_JSLHR-20-00507.

Read Charlie Wiltshire's blog summarising the research, at https://www.charlottewiltshire.com/blog/vocal-tract-mri-study

Read a related paper, Characteristics of articulatory gestures in stuttered speech: A case study using real-time magnetic resonance imaging.