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
16th September 2022 12:20 PM
Phonetics Lab Meeting
We'll read & discuss the following sections from Hockett's 1955 Manual of Phonology.
p. 3-23
P. 203-211 (section 54) - This is the "Easter Egg analogy"
Location: B11, Morrill Hall
19th September 2022 04:30 PM
Dr. Sarah Murray to talk on "The Dynamics of Speech Acts"
The Linguistic Department's Dr. Sarah Murray will be giving a talk on "The Dynamics of Speech Acts" - the talk Abstract is listed below.
Abstract:
Speech acts bridge linguistic and social meaning -- commitments can be made and modified by both linguistic and non-linguistics means. Building on recent work, I argue for a distinction between sentential force and utterance force. Sentential force is a semantic contribution differing by sentence type and can represent a range of kinds of commitments. These semantic constraints together with pragmatic and social factors produce utterance force.
With this distinction between sentential force and utterance force in place, we can examine how commitments can be modified. We will look at both linguistic modifiers, which can affect sentential force, and a wide range of elements that can influence utterance force, including contextual factors, social norms, rational/pragmatic considerations.
I will also discuss ways to represent content without a commitment to truth, including contrasts with discourse reference.
This talk is based in part on joint work with W. Starr (Philosophy).
Location: 202 Uris Hall
21st September 2022 12:20 PM
PhonDAWG - Phonetics Lab Data Analysis Working Group
Simon will demo of a Python interface to Praat
Location: B11, Morrill Hall
22nd September 2022 04:30 PM
Linguistics Colloquium Speaker: Paula Fenger, Leipzig University
The Department of Linguistics proudly presents Dr. Paula Fenger of Leipzig University.
Dr. Fenger is a Postdoctoral Researcher in the "Interaction of Grammatical Building Blocks" (IGRA) Research Training Group in Linguistics at Leipzig University
Her work focuses on syntax and morphology from a cross-linguistic perspective.
Abstract of Their Talk:
In this talk I consider the relationship between syntactic and phonological domains.
Specifically, I focus on cases where different phonological operations pick out different sized word-domains.
I take as the starting point phonological mismatches in the verbal domain in Japanese and Sinhala and explore whether these mismatches stem from the phonology or the syntax.
In the first part of the talk I argue, on the basis of in-depth syntactic and phonological wordhood tests, that word-building can be timed at different stages of the derivation, where earlier processes can be sensitive to syntactic domains (phases) and that later word-formation processes can mask the output of the syntax.
In the second part of the talk I consider some implications of this approach, in particular the idea that all such phonological mismatches stem from differences in the underlying syntactic domains.
I show that there are correlations between the domains that are picked out word-internally with the domains that are picked out by various syntactic phenomena, which is only expected if word-internal domains are inherited from the syntax.
Location: Morrill Hall, Room 106
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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