Teaching the Speech Chain

Awardees: Tom Purnell, Joe Salmons, Eric Raimy
Team Members: Cid Freitag, Ben Longoria, Chris Blakesley
Department: Communicative Disorders

Across many departments (linguistics, English, foreign languages, psychology, communication disorders), students must master how human language sounds are organized and vary at several levels: articulatory, acoustic, perceptual, cognitive, and social. We understand sounds as ‘whole’, yet characteristics on one level mismatch with characteristics on others. Understanding these connections is a tremendous challenge for instructors and students. Our simulation offers a direct-learning bridge across levels, focusing on linguistics but readily adaptable for other disciplines. Central to this simulation is that students contextualize their own speech data with others in class as well as a larger database of speakers.

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