Overview

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 a sound. This dynamic systems approach allows us to trace a clear path between the cognitive representation of action and vocal tract coordination using differential equations and non-linear mathematics. We are especially interested in collecting data for traditionally understudied languages such as Swiss German, Luxembourgish, Romansh, Italo-Romance languages (such as Venetian) and Ibero-Romance languages (such as Valenciano), as well as speech production and phonological development data for traditionally understudied groups such as children with cochlear implants, children with autism and non-native speakers of diverse languages. We strive to be an open space that welcomes researchers from all over the world to perform research in one of our areas of interest, and we gladly accept proposals for new areas of inquiries. If you are a researcher and interested in performing research at our lab, please feel free to contact us at the contact information provided on this page.