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
28th April 2025 12:20 PM
Phonetics Lab Meeting
We will discuss this paper by Mielke, Baker, & Archangeli (2016). Individual-level contact limits phonological complexity: Evidence from bunched and retroflex /ɹ/.
Our “Homework” is to prepare 1-2 questions and post them in the Discord thread.
Location: B11 Morrill Hall, Cornell University Dept, 159 Central Avenue, Morrill Hall, Ithaca, NY 14853-4701, USA
1st May 2025 04:30 PM
Linguistics Colloquium Speaker: Jeff Mielke
The Department of Linguistics proudly presents Dr. Jeff Mielke, Professor of Linguistics at North Carolina State University.
Dr. Mielke will give a talk titled: "Covert and overt articulatory variation and their implications for phonology"
This talk is funded in part by the GPSAFC and Open to the Graduate Community.
Abstract:
Large parts of phonological theory are meant to account for sound patterns that are frequently observed in spoken languages, and many of these sound patterns originate from articulatory variation.
In this talk I will explore two cases of articulatory variation in spoken language. The first case is the covert variation in tongue shape, timing, and magnitude of American English /ɹ/, which has implications for the development of several phonological patterns, including /s/ retraction, /t d/ affrication, and crispy R.
The second case is overt variation in vocal tract morphology among jaw surgery patients, something which has a large impact on the production of consonants. I will use these cases to help think about how formal properties of phonological patterns that linguists consider to be common are attributable to peculiarities of the vocal-auditory modality (as opposed to the visual-gestural modality of signed languages), and to explore the relationships between typical human vocal tracts and typical human speech sounds.
Location: 106 Morrill Hall, Cornell University, 159 Central Avenue, Morrill Hall, Ithaca, NY 14853-4701, USA
1st May 2025 06:30 PM
ASL Lecture Series: Rachel Burton
The Department of Linguistics and ASL Program proudly presents Rachel Burton, of dozanü innovations.
Rachel will present on “Healing Through The Screen: Unmasking Authenticity on Social Media".
Join Rachel for an engaging talk on the inspiration behind @suchalovelyred. Discover how she uses authenticity, creativity, and her personal journey of healing, unmasking, and finding her voice to create meaningful content—empowering you to embrace your true self.
Rachel is the Deaf creator behind Such a Lovely Red and the Director of Strategy and Initiatives at dozanü innovations, a Deaf-owned marketing company. A lifelong marketer and media professional, Rach holds a Master’s degree from NYU in Media, Culture, and Communication.
As a neurodivergent individual, Rach’s journey of healing, unmasking, and embracing her true self deeply informs her work. A passionate poet, writer, and keynote speaker, she uses her platform to inspire others to heal, find their voice, and celebrate their unique experiences. With a focus on authenticity and self-expression, Rach connects deeply with her audience, empowering them to embrace their true selves.
ASL/English interpretation will be provided.
Location: 106 Morrill Hall, Cornell University Dept, 159 Central Avenue, Morrill Hall, Ithaca, NY 14853-4701, USA
2nd May 2025 12:20 PM
Phonetics Lab Meeting
Dr. Jeff Mielke will give an informal talk titled: Phonetics and phonology of vowels in Kalasha and Bora.
Food will be served!Suggested background reading can be found on Discord.
Location: B11 Morrill Hall, Cornell University, 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 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.
©Copyright 2020, Cornell University