Hands-on Speech Science Exhibition for Children at a Science Museum

In previous studies, we developed several physical models of the human vocal tract, reporting that they are intuitive and helpful for students studying acoustics and speech science. Furthermore, we designed a sliding vocal-tract handicraft model at a science workshop, enabling children to make their own vocal-tract model with a sound source. Additionally, at various science museums, we supervised several exhibitions where children were presented with simple speech production demonstrations using physical models of the human vocal tract. In addition to these hands-on activities, we arranged an exhibition at another science museum where children could learn more about speech by analyzing their own voices, observing sound spectrograms, and synthesizing a speech sound by concatenating pre-printed, short duration spectrograms using Digital Pattern Playback (DPP). In this paper, we reported and discussed another hands-on speech science exhibition for children. In this exhibition, children 1) produced vowels using vocal-tract models, 2) observed a waveform and its spectrogram, and 3) used their own voices with DPP. We confirmed that this combination has a synergistic effect on education in acoustics and speech science.