The proposed project will integrate innovation in teaching with important basic research on vocal cord function in human speech. The research component of the project will examine the ways in which linguistic phrasing--position in a sentence, differences in sentence structure, etc.--affects the quality of sounds, particularly the way the vocal cords move, during speech. Many previous studies have not given adequate attention to the possible effects that differences in sentence structure could have on the timing of articulator movements for speech. As a result, important generalizations may have been missed about the way that variations in vocal cord function are used in the world s languages. This project will be one of the first large scale research studies which combines careful control of linguistic phrasing with carefully planned cross-language comparisons of vocal cord position and movement during speech production. The result of the research will be a clearer understanding of the similarities and differences between languages in speech production. The similarities between languages will further our understanding of the innate common linguistic abilities of all humans. The differences will make clearer some of the speech production skills which must be acquired by individuals learning a new language. The teaching portion of the project involves developing a new curriculum for basic education in phonetics, using the research results as the core of a laboratory-centered course. Students will develop basic skills in speech acoustics and physiology by collecting their own data on vocal cord function, its coordination with other speech articulators, its acoustic manifestations, etc., and comparing their data with that of the larger corpus generated in the research portion of the project. By participating in analysis of data pertinent to current research questions in the field, students will gain first hand knowledge of how scientific methods are applied t o the study of human language, and they will have a more active and collaborative educational experience.
