The Pedagogy of the Laryngeal Articulator Model

The Laryngeal Articulator Model (LAM) approach to the vocal tract in speech production has emerged over the past decades as an alternative to a strictly glotto-lingual approach. The LAM expands explanatory power by acknowledging: 1. that the larynx is a complex articulator consisting of a network of structures; and 2. that articulations in the lower vocal tract interact with articulations in the oral vocal tract. The LAM approach to speech production is not yet widely implemented in phonetics and phonology teaching materials. The main goal of this paper is to explore the different challenges of laryngeal pedagogy in order to make it easier for scholars in the field to engage with the LAM in pedagogical contexts. To do this we present the authors’ specific experiences using the LAM in different pedagogical situations: teaching voice quality, training research/teaching assistants, writing textbooks, training speech clinicians, and modelling speech production.