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 October 2024 12:20 PM
Phonetics Lab Meeting
Fengyue will review a 2013 paper by Jianjing Kuang titled: The Tonal Space of Contrastive Five Level Tones, Phonetica 2013;70:1–23, which applies Multi-Dimensional Scaling (MDS) to study cues used in producing and perceiving the five level tones of a Miao dialect.
Location: B11 Morrill Hall, 159 Central Avenue, Morrill Hall, Ithaca, NY 14853-4701, USA
23rd October 2024 12:00 PM
PhonDAWG - Phonetics Lab Data Analysis Working Group
No PhonDAWG meeting today, but people are encouraged to listen to Sam's Zoom talk at noon. Contact Sam for the Watch Party link.
Location: B11 Morrill Hall, 159 Central Avenue, Morrill Hall, Ithaca, NY 14853-4701, USA
24th October 2024 06:00 PM
ASL Performance Series presents Evelina Gaina and the "No Name Yet! Show"
The Department of Linguistics and the ASL Program proudly presents Evelina Gaina, who will perform her "No Name Yet! Show", which is a captivating blend of comedy, personal anecdotes, and cultural exploration.
No Name Yet Show is a one-of-a-kind performance that seamlessly weaves together deaf culture, motherhood, international travel, and the power of visual communication. Through a combination of American Sign Language, gestural storytelling, and improvisation, No Name Yet Show invites audiences on a hilarious and heartwarming journey filled with moving stories that inspire and entertain.
ASL/English interpretation will be provided.
Bio:
Evelina Gaina is an actress, entrepreneur, teacher, and content creator. Born in Romania and raised in Hollywood, California, Evelina has been a traveling performer, graduating from the California School for the Deaf, Riverside (CSDR), and California State University, Northridge (CSUN). She earned BA and MA degrees in Deaf Studies and Sign Language Education, respectively, from Gallaudet University.
Evelina has taught ASL for over 13 years and currently teaches bilingual performing arts at Imagination Stage in Bethesda, MD. She is also the entrepreneur behind the Baby ASL Baby TV series. In her free time, Evelina enjoys adventures with her family, including her deaf daughter, who is a Kendall Green Wildcat.
Location: Room 165, McGraw Hall, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY 14853
26th October 2024 10:30 AM
CNY Humanities Corridor Workshop: Bridging diverse subfields of linguistics through the documentation of speech communities
Syracuse, Rochester, and Cornell Universities are part of a cross-institutional collaboration – the Central New York Humanities Corridor – that supports research working groups in the humanities (https://www.cnycorridor.net/). The working group Language Sound Structures brings together scholars who work on the documentation and analysis of phonetic and phonological patterns in human language.
This year our workshop will be held at the University of Rochester, on October 26th (Saturday). The broad focus is on the relevance of phonetic investigation to linguistic research. Speech and gesture are the basic vehicle of human language and communication, not written text, but oral (& signed) communication. Phonetics and phonology address the essential aspects of the patterns and details of the linguistic speech code in its diverse presentation across languages and cultures.
Details and reminders are coming soon.
General plan:
We will start with introductions around 10:30AM, followed by a talk by Christian DiCanio (University of Buffalo), titled “Enriching Laboratory Phonology with Rich Language Data.” In the afternoon, there will be thematically arranged short talks by students and faculty. Lunch and dinner will be provided.
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Registration: To facilitate planning, please register ahead of time! Contact Heather Russell for registration details.
Location: University of Rochester
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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