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
13th April 2026 12:20 PM
PhonDAWG (Phonetics Data Analysis Working Group):
Annabelle will present her preliminary data analysis on speech discrimination in whispered speech.
Location: B11 Morrill Hall, 159 Central Avenue, Morrill Hall, Ithaca, NY 14853-4701, USA
14th April 2026 04:30 PM
ASL Lecture Series: Pamela Conley
The ASL Program at the Department of Linguistics proudly presents Pamela Conley, Associate Professor at the National Technical Institute for the Deaf at the Rochester Institute of Technology. Dr. Conley will present on "Hearing Isn’t Believing: Understanding Deaf Knowledge".
This presentation considers how social and societal assumptions about language, communication, and credibility have shaped who is recognized as a knower. Drawing on selected 19th-century literature, it examines representations of deaf perspectives and their implications for understanding knowledge today.
Pamela R. Conley, Associate Professor at RIT/NTID, brings over 30 years of experience teaching deaf and hearing students. Her research centers on marginalized deaf perspectives and how social and societal assumptions shape who is recognized as a knower.
ASL/English interpretation will be provided.
Location: 106 Morrill Hall, 159 Central Avenue, Morrill Hall, Ithaca, NY 14853-4701, USA
15th April 2026 12:20 PM
PhonDAWG (Phonetics Data Analysis Working Group):
Faolan will present her preliminary data analysis on schwa hallucination.
Location: B11 Morrill Hall, 159 Central Avenue, Morrill Hall, Ithaca, NY 14853-4701, USA
16th April 2026 04:30 PM
Linguistics Colloquium Speaker: Miloje Despic
- The Department of Linguistics proudly presents Dr. Miloje Despic, Associate Professor of Linguistics at Cornell University.
Dr. Despić will give a talk titled:
"On possessive dative constructions in Serbian and what they can tell us about second position clitics".
Abstract:
A significant generalization about Possessive Dative Constructions (PDC) is that the possessum in such constructions cannot be an agentive subject (Borer and Grodzinsky 1986, Landau 1999, Shibatani 1994 etc.).
I argue in this paper, however, that this generalization can only be a tendency, not a universal.
*I show based on previously undiscussed facts from Serbian that the projection which licenses possessive datives (PDs) (Aff(ect)P), can project below and above VoiceP (or both at the same time; e.g., Bosse et al. 2012).
*I also argue that the PD and the possessum are not related by movement in Serbian, but by binding (e.g., Borer and Grodzinsky 1986, Cheng and Ritter 1987; contra Landau 1999).
*Furthermore, the external PDs can also have their own PDs (i.e., the dative possessor can seemingly be iterated), but only if that latter is a pronominal clitic, not a full NP argument/R-expression.
These facts raise several issues about the nature of second position clitics in Serbian (e.g., Browne 1974, 1975, Zec and Inkelas 1992, Progovac 1996, Stjepanović 1998, 1999, Bošković 2001, Diesing et al. 2009, Diesing and Zec 2011, 2017 etc.), which motivate a (somewhat) novel approach to clitics, which I will try to spell-out in this talk.
In a nutshell, I propose that second position clitics are RootP-less nominals, i.e., they are essentially nominalized collections of φ-features, without a (pronominal) Root. Inflectional φ-features of clitics are left unvalued in their based generated position because they lack pronominal roots, which otherwise contribute valued φ-features.
To be licensed clitics must move to a head which can license a finite verb (typically C). Second position clitics cannot be coordinated (e.g., Cardinaletti and Starke 1999) or be complements of Ps (e.g., Abels 2003) - on the approach I suggest, these are straightforward violations of syntactic locality.
Also, since clitics lack pronominal roots, at PF they are morphologically suffixes in need of a host. Thus, there is also a post-syntactic component of the cliticization process, in which second position clitics are ordered after the 1st word/phrase, to find a phonological host (similar to Halpern’s 1995 Prosodic Inversion).
These assumptions not only derive the correct clitic order but also provide a principled way of accounting for the unexpected position of the auxiliary je ‘is’.
Location: 106 Morrill Hall, 159 Central Avenue, Morrill Hall, Ithaca, NY 14853-4701, USA
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.
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Language Corpora
- The Cornell Linguistics Department has more than 915 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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