About
The Center for Language Research at the University of Aizu was established in 1993 to foster research in English for Specific Purposes, with special emphasis on the English needed for study and work in the fields of computer science and computer engineering. In addition to research on other areas of second language acquisition, the CLR has always had a strong commitment to research on pronunciation and phonetics. Prof. Ian Wilson joined the university in 2006, and with the help of Prof. Kazuaki Yamauchi, acquired funding for an ultrasound machine, and established a separate laboratory dedicated to speech research - the CLR Phonetics Lab. This led to a great increase in the number of students doing phonetics research.
Besides Profs. Wilson and Yamauchi, other professors in the lab include Prof. Kaneko and Prof. Perkins. Prof. Wilson's main research interest is speech production and L2 acquisition of pronunciation. Experimental phonetics - both articulatory and acoustic phonetics - underlies most of his work. Since 2000, he has specialized in using ultrasound as a tool to view and measure the tongue during speech. Prof. Yamauchi is a native speaker and researcher of the Aizu dialect of Japanese. Prof. Kaneko also does research on the Aizu dialect, as well as English pronunciation and elicited imitation/shadowing of speech. Prof. Perkins is focused on tone and phonation, and he does a lot of fieldwork on Asian languages.
To learn more about the professors and students in our lab, please access the People link. Detailed research information and downloadable papers are available from the Research link. Newspaper articles and news reports about our lab are available from the Media link. This entire website is available in both English and Japanese.
