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
30th January 2025 04:30 PM
Linguistics Colloquium Speaker: Veneeta Dayal
The Department of Linguistics proudly presents Dr. Veneeta Dayal, Professor of Linguistics at Yale University, who will give a talk titled: "The Sortability Hypothesis Cross-linguistically".
This talk is funded in part by the GPSAFC and Open to the Graduate Community.
Abstract:
There are three empirical phenomena that I address in this talk: Optional Plural Marking, Overtly Marked Mention-all Questions, Spontaneous Anti-singularity. Each of these is attested in a number of languages and has been analyzed in terms of singular vs. plural reference:
1a. Manka-taq urma-ya-mun Cuzco Quechua
Pot-CONT fall-INT-TRANSLOC.3S
“A pot/Some pots fell.” |falling pot| ≥ 1b. Manka-kuna-taq urma-ya-mun
Pot-PL-CONT fall-INT-TRANSLOC.3S
“Pots fell.” |falling pot| > 1English
2a. Where can one find coffee around here? Mention-some/mention-allb. Where all can one find coffee around here? Mention-all
3a. ¿Quién se fue pronto? Spanish
Who-SG REFL left early no uniqueness presuppositionb. ¿Quiénes se fueron pronto? Anti-singularity implicature
Who-PL REFL left earlyThe Cuzco Quechua marker -kuna has been described as an optional plural marker (Faller 2007). In this respect it belongs with markers in other languages that have general number systems, ie a base nominal form that allows for singular and plural reference. Mandarin -men, Japanese -tachi, Korean -tul, Bangla -gulo/-ra, Cuzco Quechua kuna, Indonesian reduplication are other examples of optional pluralization. Such markers are cross-linguistically associated with strict plurality but there is cross-linguistic variation when it comes to animacy related effects. In some languages they are restricted to human/animate nouns, in some languages they are unrestricted.
In joint work with Liliana Sánchez and Janett Vengoa, we argue that Cuzco Quechua -kuna does not make a semantic contribution: ⟦N⟧ = ⟦N-kuna⟧. Both forms both denote a set of individuals, but -kuna requires its noun complement to denote a set that can be partitioned along some dimension (type, shape, color etc). This is the source of the strict plurality that has been observed for N-kuna: only a plurality of individuals can satisfy the sortability presupposition. The sortability presupposition interacts differently with human vs. inanimate domains, which we also address.
Insights gained from Cuzco Quechua provide a fresh perspective on the two other phenomena noted above. In each case the literature has focused on the difference between the two exponents in terms of number. This leaves unexplained several facts that become tractable when studied through the lens of the sortability hypothesis.
Location: 106 Morrill Hall, Cornell University, 159 Central Avenue, Morrill Hall, Ithaca, NY 14853-4701, USA
6th March 2025 04:30 PM
Linguistics Colloqium Speaker: Andrew Carnie
The Department of Linguistics proudly presents Dr. Andrew Carnie, Professor of Linguistics at the University of Arizona.
Location: 106 Morrill Hall, Cornell University, 159 Central Avenue, Morrill Hall, Ithaca, NY 14853-4701, USA
27th March 2025 04:30 PM
Linguistics Colloquium Speaker: Helena Aparicio
The Department of Linguistics proudly presents Dr. Helena Aaricio, Assistant Professor of Linguistics at Cornell University.
Location: 106 Morrill Hall, Cornell University, 159 Central Avenue, Morrill Hall, Ithaca, NY 14853-4701, USA
10th April 2025 04:30 PM
Linguistics Colloquium Speaker: Donka Farkas
The Department of Linguistics proudly presents Dr. Donka Farkas, Professor Emerita of Linguistics at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
Location: 106 Morrill Hall, Cornell University, 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.
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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