Lab Spotlight

  • Ongoing Studies
  • Research Goals & Aims
  • Knowledge Web
  • Publications

We are searching for participants! Find out about our current studies and see how you can get involved.

Read our research goals and aims to see how we merge multiple disciplines to paint a cohesive picture of vocal tract development.

Visit our new knowledge web to see the large and important network of connections surrounding vocal tract research.

Here you can find a comprehensive list of the research the VTLab has produced over the past 20 years, complete with links to full texts and more information.

Welcome from the VTLab

Thank you for your interest in our research on vocal tract development.

The vocal tract is a set of three cavities – oral, pharyngeal, and nasal – involved in the formation of speech sounds. Each of these cavities is formed by a combination of structures that are either soft (such as the tongue, soft palate and lips) or hard (jaw and hard palate). These cavities, and the vocal tract structures, have a complex growth pattern that is being increasingly understood through medical imaging methods such as MRI and CT.

Our Vocal Tract Development Laboratory (VTLab) uses a combination of imaging, acoustics, and vocal tract modeling to understand the lifespan changes of the vocal tract anatomy in typically and atypically developing individuals, and to examine the relation of anatomic changes to speech acoustics.

Enjoy exploring the rest of our VTLab website to find out more about our multidisciplinary research, and the state-of-the art analysis techniques we are using to study the relationships between vocal tract growth and speech acoustics.

Our beginnings

The Vocal Tract Development Laboratory was established by Houri Kaloustian Vorperian, Ph.D. at the Waisman Center in 1995 with funding support since 2000 from the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders in conjunction with support from the Friends of the Waisman Center.