What happens inside you when you speak: MRI

On the internet there are quite a lot of speech videos made with magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). But I often find that students and teachers of English pronunciation have never seen one, or looked at one carefully. So today I’m posting this short video introduction to the inner workings of speech:

Since the topic is so visual, I’ll leave the video to talk for itself. I hope it provides an entertaining reality check on the miraculous complexity, rapidity and fluidity of actual speech. Although the sound quality of the MRI video is a bit weird – the noise of the scanner has to be filtered out – there’s nothing weird about the speech. Everything you see here happens inside you whenever you speak.