UWEC CERCA 2026

We have seen a noticeable lack of understanding amongst undergraduate SLHS students in upper-level courses when recalling information on how speech sounds are made by mouth. We developed a game to reinforce knowledge about the articulation of speech sounds necessary for graduate school and a career as a speech-language pathologist or audiologist. To play the game, the course professor will give each student a notecard and display a prompt. Each student will identify a word that fits based on syntactic constraints. Students will identify sounds and write down the place, voice, and manner of articulation for each sound in the word. When finished, students exchange their work with another and identify the phonetic symbols for all sounds described. This game was played often throughout the 2025 Spring and Fall semesters, and the data is analyzed in the following semester. From the data analyzed for spring of 2025, students made errors in phonetic transcriptions with orthography, place, voice, manner, and the number of phonemes in the word. Through anecdotal evidence, students improved speed and accuracy of their transcriptions over time. This data indicates that the game is effective for helping students engage with knowledge about place, voice, and manner.