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
29th March 2023 12:10 PM
PhonDAWG - Phonetics Lab Data Analysis Working Group
We'll discuss how and when to fit mixture models.
Location: B11 Morrill Hall, 159 Central Avenue, Ithaca, NY 14853-4701, USA
29th March 2023 04:30 PM
Youmee Lee will lecture on "Animation of ASL Poetry" and will show her animated short film "Rite of Identify"
The Department of Linguistics proudly presents Youmee Lee, MFA, who will present on "Animation of ASL Poetry".
Youmee Lee, a Deaf Asian American animator, will discuss how she incorporates cultural storytelling and personal experiences into her art and animation. She will explain how she explores and develops visual expressions of sign language, Deaf culture, and performance in different mediums.
She will illustrate this by showing her MFA graduate thesis film Rite of Identity - a 2D animation film about a deaf child, Hana, who has exceptional artistic talent but struggles with an overwhelming soundscape. The purpose of the film is to encourage the viewers to think about what it is like for a child to be underestimated and to struggle with a soundscape that is not perceived naturally in the realm.
Hana represents a collection of deaf people’s childhood experiences. The film is shaped by the American Sign Language (ASL) poetry format and incorporates Deaf symbols and motifs.
For more details, you can download a PDF of Youmee's Masters Thesis.
ASL/English translation will be provided.
Location: Room 106, Morrill Hall, Cornell University Dept, 159 Central Avenue, Ithaca, NY 14853-4701, USA
30th March 2023 04:30 PM
Cognitive Science / Linguistics Colloquium Speaker: Dr. Angelika Kratzer to lecture on the semantic structure of natural languages
The Cognitive Science Program and the Department of Linguistics proudly present Dr. Angelika Kratzer, Professor Emerita at the Department of Linguistics, University of Massachusetts Amherst.
Abstract: How to Build a Knowledge Ascription
Attitude ascriptions are a litmus test for any semantic theory. They were at the center of discussion when philosophers and logicians became interested in natural language and began to develop the semantic frameworks we are relying on today. Mastery of attitude ascriptions is a milestone in the cognitive development of a child and the human species as a whole.
My lectures will be a search for the building blocks of knowledge ascriptions. The goal – like that of any semantic theory – is a typology where the combinatorics of building blocks generates the range of possible interpretations of the constructions we are trying to understand.
Knowledge ascriptions have traditionally been taken to look as in (1) or (2). I will argue that we might be well-advised to include knowledge ascriptions like those in (3), which are traditionally referred to as ‘concealed questions’.
(1) They know that Wim Wenders directed ‘Wings of Desire’.
(2) They know who directed ‘Wings of Desire’.
(3) They know the director of ‘Wings of Desire’.
I will argue that (3), rather than (1) or (2), point to a general recipe for how to build knowledge ascriptions of all types from their parts.
Bio:
Dr. Kratzer's area of specialization is semantics, an interdisciplinary field located at the intersection of linguistics, cognitive psychology, logic, and philosophy. Her research concerns how natural languages are constructed so as to make it possible for humans to assemble complex meanings systematically from small and simple pieces.
Location: 106 Morrill Hall, 159 Central Avenue, Morrill Hall, Ithaca, NY 14853-4701, USA
31st March 2023 12:10 PM
Phonetics Lab Meeting
There is no Phonetics Lab meeting this week - enjoy your Spring Break!
Location: B11 Morrill Hall, 159 Central Avenue, 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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