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
22nd April 2024 12:20 PM
Phonetics Lab Meeting
Annabelle will continue our discussion of this paper:
"What it means to be phonetic or phonological: the case of Romanian devoiced nasals", by Benjamin Tucker & Natasha Warner, Phonology 27 (2010) 289–324. f Cambridge University Press 2010 doi:10.1017/S095267571000013
Location: B11 Morrill Hall, 159 Central Avenue, Morrill Hall, Ithaca, NY 14853-4701, USA
24th April 2024 12:20 PM
PhonDAWG - Phonetics Lab Data Analysis Working Group
Jennifer will give an (advanced) Labvanced tutorial. Read about Labvanced here: https://www.labvanced.com/
Location: B11 Morrill Hall, 159 Central Avenue, Morrill Hall, Ithaca, NY 14853-4701, USA
1st May 2024 04:30 PM
ASL Symposium
ASL/Deaf Studies Program is pleased to announce the first ASL Symposium. Explore, experience, and engage with ASL!
Students from the ASL 2301 Modern Deaf Culture course will be presenting their research related to ASL on campus to celebrate the first five years of the ASL/Deaf Studies Program at Cornell.
For more information, contact Brenda Schertz at bschertz@cornell.edu.
All students are welcome. ASL/English interpretation wil be provided.
Location: 106 Morrill Hall, Cornell University Dept, 159 Central Avenue, Ithaca, NY 14853-4701, USA
2nd May 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.
- 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.
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.
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