Speech Lab Unav

the speech laboratory at the university of navarra studies the mechanical level of speech and the relationship between the high-level, cognitive level of language and the low-level mechanical level of speech. using state of the art equipment that allows us to observe the movements of the vocal tract and software that we can use to perform psycholinguistic studies in speech perception, we do experiments that seek to discover (1) how continuous speech sounds (and corresponding vocal tract movements) are represented cognitively, (2) how continuous movements coordinate in time as dynamic action units in a self-organized dynamical systems framework, (3) how native and non-native speakers learn new patterns of inter-articulatory timing, and (4) how the weighting of perceptual cues translates to vocal tract action. at the center of our study is the concept of the speech ‘gesture’, which is defined as a synergy of different muscle ensembles that coordinate for the specific task of producing