Hi everybody and welcome!
Thanks so much for joining us.
So in this video, we'll be talking a little bit about ultrasound technology 
and its use in the discipline of linguistics and also in language learning.
Today we will be addressing three
questions:
first, what is ultrasound technology?
second, why is ultrasound technology used in linguistics and language learning?
and third, how is ultrasound technology used?
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The vocal tract is something of a black box
because we can't see what's going on
inside of it when we are speaking.
So one of the most important
players on the vocal tract is the tongue
and ultrasound technology can reveal
what the tongue is doing in the speech process.
The ultrasound is as you probably know
often used in observing prenatal children.
This is made possible through echoes of high-frequency sound waves
produced by the ultrasound probe.
What we can see on the ultrasound screen is how the probe interprets those echos.
If we put the ultrasound probe under the chin,
we can see the surface of the tongue as a white line.
Importantly, we can utilize this
observation to improve pronunciations
because each speech sound has a unique
tongue shape.
Let's look at English words. 
Can you tell which side of the image represents the front of the tongue?
The answer is the front of the tongue is on the left side
 and the back of the tongue is on the right side.
Let's look at other words.
When you look at ultrasound videos,
pay attention to the shape of the tongue and the movement of the tongue.
You can see these two sounds form different tongue shapes
The tongue is made of muscles just like
the arms and legs. 
So learning to speak another language is
in many respects like learning how to dance.
After all when you learn how to dance 
you have to take special care to remember
how and where to move your arms and legs.
Similarly when you're learning to speak another language,
you have to pay special attention to
how and where to move your tongue.
So some of these sounds when you're learning to speak another language
may be very difficult to produce but
that's resulting from the fact 
that those sounds may not be present in your native language.
So you have to train your tongue
to produce the right shapes and movements.
The value of ultrasound technology in linguistics
is that it can reveal insights about how
speakers produce consonant and vowel sounds,
something that didn't exist before this
technology came about.
Well okay that's it for this video I
hope you found it useful
Thanks so much for watching!
