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
24th November 2025 12:20 PM
PhonDAWG - Phonetics Lab Data Analysis Working Group
We will continue our LabPhon Abstract review workshop.
Location: B11 Morrill Hall, 159 Central Avenue, Morrill Hall, Ithaca, NY 14853-4701, USA
4th December 2025 04:30 PM
Colloquium Talk Series - Naomi Feldman
The Cornell Linguistics Department is proud to present Dr. Naomi Feldman, Professor of Linguistics at the University of Maryland.
Dr. Feldman will give a talk titled: "Modeling speech perception at scale"
Funded in part by the GPSAFC and Open to the Graduate Community.
Abstract:
Infants learn language in the real world, but cognitive models are often trained and tested in simplified settings.
Over the past decade, our research group has created cognitive models of speech perception that can operate in more realistic environments, using speech recordings as input. We have found that results from these large-scale simulations can significantly impact our theories of language acquisition.
Infants' patterns of speech perception have traditionally been interpreted as evidence that they possess certain types of knowledge, such as representations of speech rhythm and of phonetic categories (like 'r' and 'l').
However, we have shown that models that are trained on naturalistic speech can show similar behavior to infants even though they do not have the representations that infants are hypothesized to have. Models that don't represent temporal patterns in speech can still distinguish rhythmically different languages, and models that don't have phone-like representations still show cross-linguistic differences in phonetic discrimination.
Our results call into question previous conclusions drawn from empirical results in the infant speech perception literature, and invite us to rethink the role that each of these representations plays in subsequent language learning.
This is joint work with Ruolan (Leslie) Famularo, Thomas Schatz, Yevgen Matusevych, Ali Aboelata, Xuan-Nga Cao, Herman Kamper, Emmanuel Dupoux, and Sharon Goldwater.
Funded in part by the GPSAFC and Open to the Graduate Community.
Bio:
Naomi Feldman uses methods from statistics, machine learning, and automatic speech recognition to formalize questions about how people learn and represent the structure of their language.
She primarily use these methods to study speech representations, modeling the cognitive processes that support learning and perception of speech sounds in the face of highly complex and variable linguistic input.
She also computationally characterize the strategies that facilitate language acquisition more generally, both from the perspective of learners, and from the perspective of clinicians.
Dr. Feldman received her Ph.D. in cognitive science at Brown University in 2011.
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 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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