York researcher co-hosts vocal tract session at Interspeech 2026
Posted on Wednesday 21 October 2026
Dr Amelia Gully, Lecturer in Speech Science in the Department of Language and Linguistic Science, co-hosted a special session at Interspeech 2026 in Sydney. The session, “Methods and data for vocal tract and articulation analysis”, was organised by an international project team from the University of York, Macquarie University and the University of Sydney.
The team works together on two Australian-funded research projects. Both use real-time magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to see inside the head as people speak. Researchers can then track how the tongue, lips and other speech organs move, and learn more about how speech is controlled and produced.
The first project, “Developmental trajectory of tongue control for speech with real-time MRI”, is funded by the Australian Research Council. It follows adolescents through puberty to understand how control of speech movements changes at a time when the vocal tract itself is changing in size and shape.
The second project, “As we speak: Unmasking speech changes earlier in the course of disease”, is funded by an Australian National Health and Medical Research Council Ideas Grant. It works with older adults who have been diagnosed with apraxia of speech, a condition that affects the planning of speech movements. The team hopes to understand how changes in motor control show up in speech, so that clinicians can track how severe the condition is and perhaps detect it earlier.
“Vocal tract shape and articulation data are difficult and costly to acquire, but they provide insights that underpin developments across many fields in speech science and technology,” said Dr Gully. “The session brought together researchers from a wide range of disciplines and started what we hope will be a collaborative international effort to address the outstanding methodological challenges in this research.”
Find out more on the special session website:
https://sites.google.com/york.ac.uk/is2026-vt-and-articulation/home