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
26th October 2026 12:20 PM
Phonetics Lab Meeting - Research Statement review
We will review Research Statements from Kayla, Yao, and Fengyue (Lisa).
Location: B11 Morrill Hall, 159 Central Avenue, Morrill Hall, Ithaca, NY 14853-4701, USA
28th October 2026 12:20 PM
Phonetics Lab Meeting - Research Statement review continued...
We will review research statements from all grad students.
Location: B11 Morrill Hall, 159 Central Avenue, Morrill Hall, Ithaca, NY 14853-4701, USA
29th October 2026 06:30 PM
Brenda Shertz to lecture on ASL Community Identity
Brenda Schertz, ASL Teaching Professor in Cornell's Department of Linguistics and the ASL/Deaf Studies Programk will present a lecture titled: Where ASL Lives: Language, Place, and Deaf Community Identity (see abstract below):
Please contact the Linguistics Department lingdept@cornell.edu at least 72 hours in advance of the event for any special arrangements you may require in order to attend this event.
ASL/English interpretation will be provided.
Abstract for "Where ASL Lives: Language, Place, and Deaf Community Identity"
For generations of Deaf people, American Sign Language has been deeply connected to place, community, history, and identity. Schools for the deaf have historically served not only as educational institutions but also as important sites where Deaf children encounter other Deaf people, acquire ASL, develop cultural identities, and establish lifelong social networks.
These schools have often become anchors around which local Deaf communities, organizations, businesses, social events, and traditions develop. Rochester, New York, provides a particularly compelling example. Rochester has one of the highest per-capita populations of deaf and hard-of-hearing residents in the United States. This presentation will explore the historical, educational, demographic, and community factors that have contributed to Rochester's distinctive Deaf ecosystem—and consider what happens to a sense of place and community when the institutions that have historically anchored Deaf life begin to change or disappear.
Bio:
Brenda Schertz is a Teaching Professor of ASL at Cornell University, coordinating and teaching in Cornell’s ASL/Deaf Studies Program. Brenda’s main interests include American Sign Language (ASL) and Deaf studies, concentrating on Deaf culture art, film and theatre. She has coordinated Deaf film festivals in Portland. Maine and Rochester, New York.
Location: Borg Warner Community Room, Tompkins County Public Library, 101 East Green Street, Ithaca, NY
19th November 2026 04:30 PM
Linguistics Colloquium Speaker: Kyle Rawlins
The Department of Linguistics proudly presents Dr. Kyle Rawlins, Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in the Cognitive Science Department at Johns Hopkins University.
Funded in part by the GPSAFC and Open to the Graduate Community.
Bio:
Kyle's research is primarily in three areas:
- Pragmatics and the semantics/pragmatics interface, often to do with the interpretation of questions.
- Compositional semantics and lexical semantics, especially involving the interfaces of the two.
- In computational semantics and natural language understanding. See also the Decompositional Semantics Initiative, and the MegaAttitude Project.
As part of many of these research projects, he has also been involved in the open release of various data sets.
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.
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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