Public workshop by Language Development Lab | HKU Linguistics

Friday, 2nd Nov, 13:30 – 14:30

9.27 Run Run Shaw Tower, Department of Linguistics

Speech is made up of sounds. Understanding how these sounds are created is an important part of linguistic science, but a major obstacle in investigation speech production is that much of the process takes place inside the vocal tract, invisible to the naked eye. Recently, linguists studying speech sounds have begun to use ultrasound (or sonography) to look at the movement of the tongue during speech production. With the help of ultrasound, we can see how the tongue is used to produce various speech sounds, how sounds differ from person to person, and how sounds differ between languages and dialects.

This workshop will be a practical introduction to the use of ultrasound for linguistic research. You’ll learn how an ultrasound experiment is run, how to interpret ultrasound images of the tongue, and some advantages and disadvantages of ultrasound tongue imaging. You’ll also have the opportunity to see the movement of your own tongue as you speak.