Dynamic dialects: integrating articulatory video to reveal the complexity of speech

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Our motivation for creating this resource was to bring Phonetics (the study of speech sounds) into the 21st century by making use of imaging technologies (MRI and ultrasound tongue imaging) and digital processing to allow people to see the hidden movements of the tongue and other articulatory organs inside the vocal tract. We will create an online teaching resource called Dynamic Dialects that will provide easy access to multimedia material (videos and audio) showing how the vocal organs move during real speech. The website will be designed to aid phonetic training, language teaching and learning and speech therapy and will improve people's understanding of how speech sounds are produced. Knowing how to make a sound with your tongue and other vocal organs is important when you are learning a foreign language with unfamiliar sounds, learning how to produce a sound in your own language that you have difficulty with, or if you need to teach other people how to make speech sounds, e.g. as a phonetician, language teacher or speech therapist, and also if you want to carry out research into how speech sounds change over time. Without being able to see what is going on in the vocal tract, it can be a struggle to understand what to do to achieve the correct sound quality.Traditional phonetics teaching relies on visual cues, such as lip and jaw movement; diagrams of the vocal tract; focussing on and trying to interpret the movements of your own vocal organs during speech and, of course, listening to and trying to interpret the acoustic signal produced during speech. Analysis of speech that is based mainly on listening to other people's speech or feeling your own articulatory movement can lead to misunderstandings of how speech sounds are produced. Not everyone has the same strategy for producing sounds. We find, through articulatory-based research, that speakers often have very different strategies for producing a speech sound than what might be expected.Ultrasound tongue imaging video, Magnetic Resonance Imaging video, lip movement video and animations (based on data gathered through all of these technologies) can offer a new insight into exactly how speech sounds are produced. Speech production can be taught with visual stimuli showing, or based on, real speech, to aid learning. Articulatory strategies can be copied and practised using a visual, as well as auditory, models. The Dynamic Dialects articulatory teaching resource will allow contain a collection of pronunciations of words from speakers of different varieties of English, which will be an invaluable resource for the study of linguistic change in the future, preserving not only how speech sounded, but how it was produced.