Although existing electromagnetic mid-sagittal articulography Systems have provided invaluable information on speech kinematics, they are not suited to monitor substantial lateral deviations of the tongue from the midline without error. Due to their need for a fixed head-position they also restrict the subjects’ freedom of movement and thus potentially compromise the naturalness of their speech. Accordingly we started the development of a new electromagnetic articulography system at the IPSK, which is able to acquire data within a spherical area without further restrictions. The new 3-D-EMA system is based on a spherical placement of 6 transmitter coils but operates with the same receiver coils as the Carstens AG100 system. We significantly reduced the number of analog components and built a digital-featured device. During the last couple of months we did several 3-DMeasurements to estimate the measurement accuracy of the new device. We obtained a spatial resolution better than 1 mm and a rotation detection with approx. 1 degree accuracy. We were also able to verify that the magnetic field strength of the new device is about 2 μT at the center of the measurement area which is comparable to former model calculations of magnetic field strength. We present first 3-D measurement data on a human subject collected with a prototype of the new 3-D-EMA system. To compensate movements of the subjects head during the measurement and to transform the measured data into a skull-fixed coordinate system, reference coils must be placed on the subjects head and an extra algorithm has to subtract head-movements from the movements of the sensors. Although we had to deal with some technical problems caused by preliminary parts of our prototype, the data collected to date shows that the new 3-D system is capable to aquire multidimensional data of speech movements. Especially the limited measurement frequency of the prototype (25 Hz) prevented us from collecting more articulographic significant data, since with only a few measured points per utterance it is difficult to analyze trajectories of speech movement. Still, even this prototype shows promising prospects and a new set of hardware components is currently being assembled. In the near future we will focus on the calibration procedure and – with increased number of channels – on the compensation of head movements during the measurements with sufficient accuracy to obtain more phonetically relevant data.