About
The Cornell Phonetics Lab is a group of students and faculty who are curious about speech. We study patterns in speech — in both movement and sound. We do a variety research — experiments, fieldwork, and corpus studies. We test theories and build models of the mechanisms that create patterns. Learn more about our Research. See below for information on our events and our facilities.
Upcoming Events
21st April 2022 04:30 PM
Colloquium Talk Series: Dr. Junko Shimoyama discusses Embedded negative polar questions in Japanese
Dr, Junko Shimoyama of McGill University will give a Zoom talk titled:
Embedded negative polar questions in Japanese: Explaining the puzzling distribution of embedded noncanonical negation.
This Colloquium Talk Series is sponsored by the Cornell Department of Linguistics & The Cornell Linguistics Circle.
Please contact Heather Russell at hlm2@cornell.edu for the Zoom link.
Abstract:
There are at least two environments in Japanese where non-canonical negation has been identified in the literature.
One type of non-canonical negation is described in Yoon (2011, 2013) as similar to but contrasting in interesting ways with ‘subordinate expletive negation’ in, for example, Romance languages.
Another type of non-canonical negation is found in negative polar questions that convey the speaker's positive epistemic bias (Sudo 2013, Ito & Oshima 2016).
Our goal is to explain a puzzle about the distribution of what has been described as ‘subordinate expletive negation’ in Japanese by identifying it as the negation in embedded positively biased negative polar questions.
We will demonstrate how such negative polar questions can be embedded under non-question selecting predicates in Japanese by looking at properties of the speech act embedding particle to, which contrasts with the English declarative complementizer, that.
Location:26th April 2022 12:20 PM
Phonetics Lab Meeting
Chloe will lead the discussion of this week's paper:
Large-scale analysis of Spanish /s/-lenition using audiobooks
Location:
27th April 2022 12:20 PM
PhonDAWG - Phonetics Lab Data Analysis Working Group
Bruce will give a 50-minute talk that covers:
- -microphone types and their spatial/frequency characteristics
- -headphones/speakers
- -audio recorders (including new Zoom "no-clipping" recorders)-Available P-Lab microphones and recorders
- -Cool stuff I've learned in my Sound Design class (PMA 3680) with Warren Cross
Those planning field or Sound Booth audio recording experiments will find this session very informative.
Note that the first half of this talk will be a Cornell Linked-In Learning tutorial video by sound engineer Bobby Owsinski - this video is the best illustration of microphone characteristics and microphone placement that I've ever seen!
For those who can't make it on Wednesday - or who have low-bandwidth Zoom connections - here are the instructions for playing this video on your laptops:
- -Log into Cornell Linked-In Learning https://it.cornell.edu/linkedinlearning
- -Search for “Audio Recording Techniques” by Bobby Owsinski
- -Go to Part 2 – Microphone Basics - we'll play through through “microphone accessories” (about 20 minutes)
- -Then jump to Part 4 – Microphone Placement Basics - “finding the best place in the room” for recording - about 3 minutes.
Location:
Facilities
The Cornell Phonetics Laboratory (CPL) provides an integrated environment for the experimental study of speech and language, including its production, perception, and acquisition.
Located in Morrill Hall, the laboratory consists of six adjacent rooms and covers about 1,600 square feet. Its facilities include a variety of hardware and software for analyzing and editing speech, for running experiments, for synthesizing speech, and for developing and testing phonetic, phonological, and psycholinguistic models.
Web-Based Phonetics and Phonology Experiments with LabVanced
The Phonetics Lab licenses the LabVanced software for designing and conducting web-based experiments.
Labvanced has particular value for phonetics and phonology experiments because of its:
- *Flexible audio/video recording capabilities and online eye-tracking.
- *Presentation of any kind of stimuli, including audio and video
- *Highly accurate response time measurement
- *Researchers can interactively build experiments with LabVanced's graphical task builder, without having to write any code.
Students and Faculty are currently using LabVanced to design web experiments involving eye-tracking, audio recording, and perception studies.
Subjects are recruited via several online systems:
- * Prolific and Amazon Mechanical Turk - subjects for web-based experiments.
- * Sona Systems - Cornell subjects for for LabVanced experiments conducted in the Phonetics Lab's Sound Booth
Computing Resources
The Phonetics Lab maintains two Linux servers that are located in the Rhodes Hall server farm:
- Lingual - This Ubuntu Linux web server hosts the Phonetics Lab Drupal websites, along with a number of event and faculty/grad student HTML/CSS websites.
- Uvular - This Ubuntu Linux dual-processor, 24-core, two GPU server is the computational workhorse for the Phonetics lab, and is primarily used for deep-learning projects.
In addition to the Phonetics Lab servers, students can request access to additional computing resources of the Computational Linguistics lab:
- *Badjak - a Linux GPU-based compute server with eight NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080Ti GPUs
- *Compute server #2 - a Linux GPU-based compute server with eight NVIDIA A5000 GPUs
- *Oelek - a Linux NFS storage server that supports Badjak.
These servers, in turn, are nodes in the G2 Computing Cluster, which currently consists of 195 servers (82 CPU-only servers and 113 GPU servers) consisting of ~7400 CPU cores and 698 GPUs.
The G2 Cluster uses the SLURM Workload Manager for submitting batch jobs that can run on any available server or GPU on any cluster node.
Articulate Instruments - Micro Speech Research Ultrasound System
We use this Articulate Instruments Micro Speech Research Ultrasound System to investigate how fine-grained variation in speech articulation connects to phonological structure.
The ultrasound system is portable and non-invasive, making it ideal for collecting articulatory data in the field.
BIOPAC MP-160 System
The Sound Booth Laboratory has a BIOPAC MP-160 system for physiological data collection. This system supports two BIOPAC Respiratory Effort Transducers and their associated interface modules.
Language Corpora
- The Cornell Linguistics Department has more than 880 language corpora from the Linguistic Data Consortium (LDC), consisting of high-quality text, audio, and video corpora in more than 60 languages. In addition, we receive three to four new language corpora per month under an LDC license maintained by the Cornell Library.
- This Linguistic Department web page lists all our holdings, as well as our licensed non-LDC corpora.
- These and other corpora are available to Cornell students, staff, faculty, post-docs, and visiting scholars for research in the broad area of "natural language processing", which of course includes all ongoing Phonetics Lab research activities.
- This Confluence wiki page - only available to Cornell faculty & students - outlines the corpora access procedures for faculty supervised research.
Speech Aerodynamics
Studies of the aerodynamics of speech production are conducted with our Glottal Enterprises oral and nasal airflow and pressure transducers.
Electroglottography
We use a Glottal Enterprises EG-2 electroglottograph for noninvasive measurement of vocal fold vibration.
Real-time vocal tract MRI
Our lab is part of the Cornell Speech Imaging Group (SIG), a cross-disciplinary team of researchers using real-time magnetic resonance imaging to study the dynamics of speech articulation.
Articulatory movement tracking
We use the Northern Digital Inc. Wave motion-capture system to study speech articulatory patterns and motor control.
Sound Booth
Our isolated sound recording booth serves a range of purposes--from basic recording to perceptual, psycholinguistic, and ultrasonic experimentation.
We also have the necessary software and audio interfaces to perform low latency real-time auditory feedback experiments via MATLAB and Audapter.
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