Project Summary
The Speech Production Research Education Initiative will create a forum that facilitates the study of speech production by connecting many labs and providing students with an integrated view of this topic.
Speech production is a complicated process that starts with cognition as a speaker makes a plan for speech, and follows with muscle commands in which a speaker controls breathing and muscle movements for articulation. We tend to take the system for granted not realizing its importance to health, science, society and the economy.
This project brings together unparalleled resources in speech production expertise at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign to provide graduate students with cross-disciplinary training in speech production to tackle tough problems that impact health, language preservation and marketable communication technologies. Societal problems that can be addressed include
- improved treatment of communication disorders
- recording the speech physiology of understudied languages for enhanced preservation
- visualizing speech / brain relationships
- advanced machine recognition of speech
Our forum will take students to different labs on a regular basis throughout the year, where they will discuss research projects and engage in hands-on experimentation. Students from Speech and Hearing Science, Foreign Languages, Liguistics and Engineering will be exposed to the equipment used by each lab. A host student will demonstrate the use of the equipment in the context of data collection and develop a short training regimen. On a monthly basis, one student will present a recent journal article that uses speech production methodology.
The Project will culminate in a summer symposium (May 5-6, 2011) where experts who represent the breadth of speech production applications will be invited. This site now active. Please follow the symposium for information about registration, abstract submission and the speakers.