Let children experience speech science

Abstract

An education in acoustics is important for students of different ages: college, high school, middle school, and potentially even elementary school students, for whom such hands‐on models are the most important. Because speech communication is a basic human activity, even for children, we expect that even the youngest students to be interested in speech science. With this in mind, we were motivated to develop intuitive and effective models for teaching speech science to all types of students. Our physical models of the human vocal tract [T. Arai, J. Phonetic Soc. Jpn., 5(2), 31–38 (2001)] have recently been installed in an exhibition in a museum in Japan. Children can watch, listen to, and touch the models. Our recent head‐shaped and lung models [T. Arai, Acoust. Sci. Technol. 27(2), 111–113 (2006)] are also useful for educating students, because they are intuitive to produce a systematic and comprehensive education from the lungs to the head. Furthermore, we recently designed a sliding three‐tube (S3T) model that has a simple mechanism for producing several different vowels [T. Arai, Acoust. Sci. Technol (to be published)]. This model is being used for an activity at a science workshop for children. [Work partially supported by JSPS.KAKENHI (17500603).]