Hey Bruce,
Pretty neat, huh.  About 6-7 years ago Yale was looking to discontinue its
linguistics program as part of an effort to balance the budget.  Yale had
been a for-runner a leader in this field until MIT began to take the lead
with Chomsky some decades back.  Linguistics has survived at Yale and there
is good private enterprise in Haskins.  As they are only 1/2 hour from my
office I am going to see if they give demonstrations of this device.  As I
understand it these guys are the "Applied Mechanics of the linguists.
Best,
Leland

-----Original Message-----
From: Bruce Marcham <[log in to unmask]>
To: [log in to unmask]
<[log in to unmask]>
Date: Thursday, February 18, 1999 10:26 AM
Subject: Re: Watching what you say?


>It appears to be a device for studying speech problems.
>
>Check out this site pertaining to Haskins Lab:
>
>
>http://www.phonetik.uni-muenchen.de/Haskins/Haskins/MISC/Facilities/Magneto
m
>etry.html
>
>I copied the text from the site and its home page:
>
>We use an Electromagnetic Midsagittal Articulometer system which was
>designed at MIT and is known by the name EMMA (Perkell, Cohen, Svirsky,
>Matthies, Garabieta & Jackson, 1992). EMMA is designed for adult subjects
>who are seated in a chair. The system uses a three-coil transmitter
assembly
>attached to the head by means of a headband. These transmitter coils
produce
>alternating magnetic fields at three frequencies in the range from 50-75
>kHz. Undue stress on the head and neck from the weight of the transmitter
>assembly is prevented by a counterbalancing weight acting through a pulley
>system attached to the ceiling. Receiver coils, approximately 1.5 x 1.5 x
>1.0 mm in size, are attached to the subject's tongue, lips, jaw etc. by
>means of a dental adhesive. The magnitudes of the alternating voltages
>induced by the three transmitter coils provide position information which
is
>conveyed to the inputs of electronic amplifiers and discriminators by fine
>wire leads. The rectified output voltages of the magnetometer, which
>represent the distances of each receiver from each of the transmitter
coils,
>are subsequently input to a computer via an analog-to-digital converter.
>Computer software is then employed to convert these voltages into sample by
>sample positions in a Cartesian coordinate system.
>
>The EMMA system provides inputs for ten receiver coils. Two of the ten
>receivers are usually attached to fixed points on the subject's head such
as
>the maxilla and nasal bridge and are exclusively employed as reference
>points. These reference receivers are monitored by the conversion software
>which uses changes in their position to detect any unwanted head movement
>with respect to the helmet and to correct the data from the other eight
>receiver coils. In addition, the software provides the ability to rotate
>and/or translate the origin of the coordinate system. Thus, if position
data
>are input from two other receivers attached to a Lucite bite plane (roughly
>30mm apart) which is held between the subject's teeth (so defining the
>occlusal plane), this information can be used to compute a transformation
>that will relocate one of the bite-plane receivers to the origin of the
>coordinate system and rotate the subject's occlusal plane into coincidence
>with the x-axis. Subsequently this same transformation can be used to
>translate and rotate all the x,y data obtained from an experiment to the
new
>coordinate location.
>
>
>Haskins Laboratories:
>
>Haskins Laboratories is a private, non-profit research laboratory founded
in
>1935, and named after its founder, Dr. Caryl P. Haskins. The Haskins
>Laboratories have been continuously engaged in interdisciplinary basic
>research for over fifty years. Under its previous Presidents, Dr. Franklin
>S. Cooper (1955-1975), Dr. Alvin Liberman (1975-1986), and Dr. Michael
>Studdert-Kennedy (1986-1992), the Laboratories did pioneering work on the
>acoustics of speech, the development of speech synthesis and its
application
>to the study of speech perception. This commitment to state-of-the-art
>research continues under our present President, Dr. Carol A. Fowler.
>
>We are located in Connecticut and are affiliated with Yale University and
>the University of Connecticut. Many of our research associates have
academic
>positions at other universities including Wesleyan, CUNY, URI, The Hebrew
>University, and others. We also have a cooperative agreement with the ATR
>Research Laboratories in Kyoto, Japan. Currently, most of the Laboratories'
>research projects are focused on problems in human communication. Our main
>areas of research include speech perception, synthesis and analysis, speech
>production, motor behavior, linguistics, phonetics, reading, cognitive
>science, ecological psychology, nonlinear dynamics and complexity, etc.
>
>
>-----Original Message-----
>From: Leland Torrence [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
>Sent: Thursday, February 18, 1999 9:47 AM
>To: [log in to unmask]
>Subject: Re: Watching what you say?
>
>
>Does anyone know what a Electromagnetic Midsagittal Articulometer is?
>
>Best,
>Leland
>