Electropalatography (EPG)

The EPG is a device which uses an artificial hard palate coveredwith 62 (96 for palatometer) electrically conducting contacts to dynamicly display patterns of tongue-palate contact. Four commercial systems have been built.

The Reading EPG

This device has been developed in labs in Reading University and at Queen Margaret College, Edinburgh. The system exists in 4 forms. EPG2 and EPG3 are early verions of the instrument involving slightly different hardware and software but both based on PC DOS. Reading University have developed a Unix interface and analysis using the EPG3 hardware connected to a Sun workstation. They have also written an addon to the XWaves speech analysis package to integrate EPG analysis. The most recent development is a Windows EPG system which uses redesigned hardware.

The Rion System, Japan.

The Linguagraph

Linguagraph is built by the University of Kent, Canterbury and uses the Reading palate.

The Palatometer

Kay Elemetrics have stopped producing the palatometer designed by S. Fletcher which consists of 96 contact points. They still market a palatometer database which contains a variety of standard reading passages by a number of speakers. Logometrix now make a palatometer with up to 120 electrodes.

For all systems a new palate must be specially made for each subject. The cost for the reading palate is approximately 180 pounds sterling and for the palatometer it is about 400 US dollars.