Thank you to Kristine Yu, Michael Wilson, Rong Yin, Jaieun Kim, Coral Hughto, Leland Kusmer, Andrew Lamont, and Katie Tetzloff for putting together an amazing performance at the ‘Science Night’ held at Jackson Street School in Northampton. Parents and students greatly enjoyed the presentations and activities, and gave a lot of positive word to the event organizers.

Kristine and Andrew lead helped kids to make their own model larynxes, and teach them about the anatomy of speech. Leland produced spectrographs of the kids saying their own name, used them to teach the kids about acoustics and then printed them out to take home. Katie walked the kids through the sounds of the world’s languages, the IPA, and then helped them to write their own names in IPA. Coral demonstrated the McGurk Effect to bewildered students and parents. Michael, Rong, and Jaieun taught the children and the parents about recursion in human language, using iPad-based materials developed by the members of LARC.

Thank you to all of them for their incredible energy and chemistry with both the kids and their parents. Everyone walked away with both an understanding and an excitement about linguistics science!

The organizers of the event have already promised to ‘knock on our door’ again for next year’s science night…