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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


  • 26th February 2021 12:40 PM

    Phonetics Lab Meeting

    Binna and Francesco will give a practice talk for FiNo 2021:

    "Articulatory hallmarks of Icelandic voiced fricative lenition and their implications for phonological theory"

    Location:
  • 3rd March 2021 11:20 AM

    PhonDAWG - Phonetics Lab Data Analysis Working Group

    Chloe will tell us about her experiment and show some pilot results.

    Location:
  • 5th March 2021 12:40 PM

    Phonetics Lab Meeting

    Catch up / TBD

    Location:
  • 12th March 2021 09:55 AM

    Dr. Vera Demberg (Saarland University) talk on researching discourse comprehension through crowd-sourcing annotation

    Computational Psycholinguistics Discussions (C.Psyd) is hosting invited speaker Dr. Vera Demberg (Saarland University) for a talk titled:  "Investigating individual differences in discourse comprehension through crowd-sourcing annotation"

    Abstract: Disagreements between annotators in discourse relation annotation are a commonly observed problem in discourse bank creation, and subsequent inconsistencies in annotation may negatively affect discourse relation classification results. In my talk, I will present our recent work on crowd-sourcing discourse relation annotations. I will present our data collection methodology, and argue that crowd-sourcing discourse annotations can help us to better understand whether discrepancies in interpretation should be continued to be considered "random noise" or whether these discrepancies are systematic. I will then proceed to discuss our studies on individual differences in discourse relation interpretation, with specific focus on the interpretation of specification and instantiation relations, as well as predictive processing of list signal cues. We find that differences in interpretation are related to individual biases, which can in turn be related to depth of processing and to linguistic experience.

    Bio: Vera Demberg is a professor of computer science and computational linguistics at Saarland University. She obtained her PhD from the University of Edinburgh, in the area of computational psycholinguistics. Her current research areas include discourse processing, as well as experimental and computational psycholinguistics and natural language generation.

     

    Location:

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.