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
19th October 2026 12:20 PM
PhonDAWG - Phonetics Lab Data Analysis Working Group
Yao will present a preliminary analysis of her dissertation data.
Location: B11 Morrill Hall, 159 Central Avenue, Morrill Hall, Ithaca, NY 14853-4701, USA
21st October 2026 08:00 AM
Dr. Peggy Mok to lecture on Tone Sandhi Phonetics and Phonology
Dr. Peggy Mok of the Chinese University of Hong Kong will give an online YouTube lecture titled: Acoustic Evidence for Phonological Represetnation and Sound Change of Tone Sandhi | Speech Prosody - see the Abstract below.
Abstract:
Tone sandhi, the obligatory process of tonal alternation conditioned by the phonological environment, is a common phenomenon in Chinese languages.
Many Chinese languages have complex tone sandhi patterns, typically described in terms of discrete phonological categories and rules that rewrite citation tones as their sandhi forms. However, phonological transcriptions may obscure important variation in their actual realization.
This study examines production data from speakers of different age groups in two Chinese varieties with complex right-dominant tone sandhi patterns, Wenzhou Wu and Xiamen Southern Min. Acoustic analyses reveal differences between tones represented as identical, as well as similarities between categories treated as distinct. Cross-generational variation further shows that these relationships can be dynamic, contributing to the reorganization of the tone sandhi patterns.
By comparing phonological transcriptions with their detailed phonetic realizations, this study illustrates how acoustic evidence can provide insights into the nature and representation of phonological categories, as well as their development and reorganization in the course of sound change.
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21st October 2026 12:20 PM
Phonetics Lab Meeting
Jennifer will give a practice talk.
Location: B11 Morrill Hall, 159 Central Avenue, Morrill Hall, Ithaca, NY 14853-4701, USA
22nd October 2026 12:20 PM
John Whitman to give a talk on Threatened Languages
On Thursday, October 22, Linguistics Professor and Phonetics Lab member Dr. John Whitman will give talk on his experiences teaching the Fall semester Introduction to Language Endangerment and Revitalization class. This lecture is part of an exhibit opening at the Kroch Library titled: Languages at the Brink: Threatened Languages and How We Protect Them.
John's talk will be given during the exhibit opening reception at Olin Library 107, which will run from 4:30-6:00PM. As part of John's lecture, his students will talk about their research projects for the class that are included in the exhibit.
The exhibit (see the abstract below) focuses on five examples of endangered languages:
- *the Ainu language of northern Japan
- *the Celtic language Welsh
- *Yiddish, a Germanic language with elements of Slavic and Hebrew
- *Garifuna, a Caribbean Arawakan language with West African influence
- *Gayogo̱hó:nǫˀ, the Indigenous language of the region where Cornell University is located.
For more information about the exhibit and John's involvement in Language preservation, see this Cornell Chronicle article: Library exhibit highlights endangered languages.
Exhibit Abstract:
Human languages, like biological species, go through cycles of growth, decline, endangerment, and sometimes disappearance. This exhibit will explore the causes of threats to language, as well as the way that humans organize to protect certain endangered languages. It will showcase what Cornell and Cornell University Library are doing to preserve acutely endangered languages, with a focus on the Northern Iroquoian language Gayogo̱hó:nǫˀ, the preservation of the endangered Ainu language in Japan, Garifuna–an Arawakan language with Western African influence, Yiddish, and Welsh.
This exhibit - which will run from October 22, 2026 to May 31, 2027 - is a collaboration among Cornell University Library's Olin Library and Kroch Library Asia Collections and the Cornell Linguistics Department. It is part of a series of exhibits titled From the Brink: Contributions to a Sustainable Future from across Cornell, hosted by different libraries across Cornell University Library in close partnership with other departments and groups on campus.
From the Brink showcases collections, research support, and collaborative efforts across Cornell and illuminate ways of addressing issues of critical, global importance. The series of exhibits aims to stimulate conversations about the threat of environmental and cultural loss and its implications, while also offering insights about positive developments and constructive steps toward a healthier future for our planet and our communities.
Location: Carl A. Kroch Library (located in the Olin Library, Room 107)
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.
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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.
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