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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.

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Upcoming Events


  • 25th March 2024 12:20 PM

    Phonetics Lab Meeting

    Phonetics Lab alumnus Dr. Francesco Burroni (PhD 2023) will give a talk over zoom entitled: 

     

    Features of Geminate and Singleton consonants In Italian and (a little bit) beyond!

     

     

     

     

    Location: B11 Morrill Hall, 159 Central Avenue, Morrill Hall, Ithaca, NY 14853-4701, USA
  • 27th March 2024 12:20 PM

    PhonDAWG - Phonetics Lab Data Analysis Working Group

    We will read and discuss the following paper by Dr. Amanda Rysling  (and don't forget to attend her colloquia talk on Thursday!)

     

    Processing of linguistic focus depends on contrastive alternatives by Morwenna Hoeks, Maziar Toosarvandani, and Amanda Rysling;  Journal of Memory and Language Volume 132, October 2023

     

     

     


     

    Location: B11 Morrill Hall, 159 Central Avenue, Morrill Hall, Ithaca, NY 14853-4701, USA
  • 28th March 2024 04:30 PM

    Linguistics Colloquium Speaker: Amanda Rysling to speek on Linguistic Efficiency and what it takes to comprehend (a) focus

    The Cornell Linguistics Department proudly presents Linguistics Colloquium Speaker Dr. Amanda Rysling. Assistant Professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz. 

     

    Dr. Rysling will  give a talk titled:  "A new window on linguistic efficiency: what it takes to comprehend (a) focus."

     

    Funded in part by the GPSAFC and Open to the Graduate Community.

     

    Abstract:

     

    Over the past half-century, psycholinguistic studies of linguistic focus — often described only as the most important or informative material — have found that comprehenders preferentially attend to focused material and process it more "deeply" or "effortfully" than non-focused material.

     

    But psycholinguists have investigated only a limited subset of focus constructions, and we have not come to an understanding of how costly focus is to process, what factors govern that cost, or why the language comprehension system behaves in the way that it does, and not others.

     

    In this talk, I discuss the problem for language comprehenders presented by the category of focus, and present evidence that focus processing is generally costly, but this cost can be attenuated by the presence of contrastive alternatives to a focus in the context before that upcoming focus, as would be expected on the basis of proposals in formal semantics (see Rooth, 1992, i.m.a.).

     

    Evidence from the processing of second-occurrence foci demonstrate that comprehenders seem to work harder than our general models of sentence processing would posit that they should have to in comprehending given focused material.

     

    These findings add to our understanding of what it means to be good enough or efficient in language processing, delineating conditions under which comprehenders do (not) find apparently important material to be worth processing deeply or effortfully.

     

    Bio:

     

    Dr. Rysling is an assistant professor in the Department of Linguistics at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She  is interested in how language is represented and processed; in particular, she seeks cases in which the processing of a linguistic unit is affected by the phonetic, phonological, or prosodic context in which that unit occurs.

     

    This theme unifies her work on segmental perception, lexical bias effects, cues to prosodic structure, sonority sequencing and vowel alternations in Polish, and, more recently, semantic representation and processing.

     

    Her name is pronounced either [rɨslɨŋ], with igryk, or [ɹislɨŋ], like the wine.

     

    Location: 106 Morrill Hall, 159 Central Avenue, Morrill Hall, Ithaca, NY 14853-4701, USA
  • 11th April 2024 04:30 PM

    Linguistics Colloquium Speaker: Maher Bahloul

    The Department of Linguistics proudly presents Dr. Maher Bahloul, Visiting Scholar at Cornell University and Lecturer at Ithaca College.  Dr. Bahloul will present on "Exploring the Linguistic Landscape of Middle East Pidgin Arabic: An Analysis of Unique Features".

     

    Abstract:

     

    Middle East Pidgin Arabic (MEPA) emerges as a fascinating linguistic phenomenon in the Middle East region, representing a dynamic interplay of diverse linguistic influences. This talk delves into the unique linguistic features that characterize this pidgin, shedding light on its distinctive phonology, morphology, syntax, lexicon, and sociolinguistic dimensions. Drawing on data collected through interviews, participant observations, and linguistic analysis, the research identifies key elements that distinguish MEPA from both its parent languages and other Arabic varieties.

     

     

    The talk begins by providing a historical overview of the socio-cultural contexts that have contributed to the development of MEPA. By examining its roots in the intersection of Arabic, Urdu, Hindi, English, and other South East Asian languages, the research highlights the fluidity and adaptability that characterize MEPA as a contact language. Linguistic analysis reveals innovative phonological, morphological, and syntactic structures, lexical borrowings, and semantic shifts that define the unique linguistic landscape of Middle East Pidgin Arabic.

     

     

    Ultimately, this exploration of Middle East Pidgin Arabic contributes to a broader understanding of language contact and evolution in multilingual societies. By unraveling the distinctive linguistic features of MEPA, this study provides valuable insights into the dynamic nature of language in the Middle East region, offering a foundation for future research on pidginization, creolization, and language hybridity in diverse linguistic landscapes.

     

    Bio:

     

    Dr. Maher Bahloul holds a Ph.D. from Cornell University in Linguistics and an MA in Linguistics from Sorbonne University in Paris, France.

     

    He has taught courses in language (English, Arabic, and French), translation, and linguistics for the past 30 years. His research interest covers issues in theoretical linguistics, applied linguistics, the sociology of language, teaching and learning pedagogy, the use of arts in education, and Spoken Arabic varieties. He has taught in the United States, North Africa, and the Middle East.

     

    Dr. Bahloul has been very active with academic publishing and professional activities. He presented a variety of papers and conducted several workshops in regional and international venues. With around 100 talks and workshops and 30 peer-reviewed books, book chapters and articles, Dr. Bahloul continues to promote the fields of spoken languages, teaching and learning pedagogies, and the use of arts in education.

     

     

    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.

Computing Resources

The Phonetics Lab maintains two Linux servers that are located in the Rhodes Hall server farm:

 

  • Lingual -  This web server hosts the Phonetics Lab Drupal websites, along with a number of event and faculty/grad student HTML/CSS websites.  

 

  • Uvular - This 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 uses the SLURM Workload Manager for submitting batch jobs  that can run on any available server or GPU on any cluster node.  The G2 cluster currently contains 159 compute nodes and 81 GPUs.

 

 

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.

 

 

  • 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.

Ultrasound

Our GE LOGIQbook portable ultrasonic imaging system is used for studying vocal tract kinematics and dynamics.

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.