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
5th December 2024 04:30 PM
Linguistics Colloquium Speaker: Dr. Martina Martinovic lectures on "Clitics in Wolof: Syntax all the way up"
The Department of Linguistics proudly presents Dr. Martina Martinovic, Assistant Professor at McGill University.
Dr. Martinovic will give a talk titled: Clitics in Wolof: Syntax all the way up
Abstract:
This talk explores the properties and placement of Wackernagel-like clitics in the Niger-Congo language Wolof.
I affirm the proposal initially put forth by Dunigan (1994), that Wolof clitics move to the highest head in the extended projection of the verb, contra subsequent analyses which argue for the need for a prosodic component to Wolof clitic placement (Zribi-Hertz & Diagne 2002, Russell 2006).
The main argument for the absence of a post-syntactic readjustment of clitic position comes from the behavior of the subject clitic, which is initial in the extended projection of the verb if there is no higher functional head that could attract it, but patterns with other clitics when such a head is present.
I show that this is straightforwardly accounted for if the subject clitic can undergo EPP-triggered A-movement to the specifier of the highest head in the extended projection of the verb, placing it outside the c-command domain of that head. I demonstrate that accounts which argue for a prosodic component to clitic placement misanalyze a crucial piece of data related to subject pronouns; once the correct empirical observations are adopted, a purely syntactic analysis straightforwardly derives all clitic placement patterns.
I formalize clitic movement as triggered by an EDGE-feature on the highest head in the extended projection of the verb, so that the goal feature on the clitics becomes activated in the c-command domain of the EDGE-feature, and stays inactive otherwise. Finally, clitic climbing reveals another property of Wolof clitics: their need to be located in the inflectional layer of the clause.
Wolof clitics confirm an important property of Wackernagel-like clitics: that their movement is primarily syntactic, as argued by Ouhalla (1989) for Berber, Franks (1998/2010) for Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian, and Legate (2008) for Warlpiri, even if it in some languages involves a prosodic component. Clitic Movement of this type looks similar to other types of movement to the edges of domains.
To the extent that such movements are syntactically motivated, so then is the movement of Wolof-type clitics.
Bio:
Dr. Martinovic is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Linguistics at McGill University. She obtained her dissertation from the University of Chicago in 2015.
Her primary research interests lie in cross-linguistic variation in the domains of morphology and syntax. The overarching goal of her work is to uncover operations responsible for the building of syntactic structures and the role of other modules of the grammar, especially morphology, in their final shape. To that end, she explores the cross-linguistic uniformity of syntax, while identifying ways in which certain phenomena that superficially appear to be syntactic can in fact be relegated to other modules of the grammar.
She has also done work in phonetics/phonology, where she is especially interested in word-accentual systems.
She collects her data primarily through fieldwork. Since 2011 she has worked extensively on Wolof, a West-Atlantic language spoken in Senegal. Since 2021, she has also worked on the Volta-Niger language Igala, spoken in Nigeria.
Other topics she has worked on include:
- *A’-movement and its morpho-syntactic effects
- *Cartographic and non-cartographic effects
- *Ordering of syntactic and post-syntactic (morphological) operations
- *Copular sentences the syntax of information structure
- *The syntax and semantics of tense and aspect
- *Control
Location: Morrill Hall, 106 Cornell University Dept, 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.
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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