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
/index.jpg)
28th September 2026 12:20 PM
Phonetics Lab Meeting
Faolan will lead the discussion of Pocholo Umbal's paper "Stability in the face of contact" - a paper on the linguistic outcomes of language contact.
Abstract:
The sociolinguistic realities of multilingualism raise questions about the linguistic outcomes of language contact.
The present study addresses this issue in the context of heritage languages. It investigates whether the relative backness of /u/ in Heritage Tagalog exhibits crosslinguistic influence from English. Over 1600 tokens of Tagalog /u/ were extracted from spontaneous speech of two generations of heritage speakers in Toronto and two groups of age-matched homeland speakers in Manila.
A multivariate analysis of linguistic and social factors shows lack of an apparent time change in Toronto and in Manila: /u/ is realized in the back periphery of the vowel space; though some degree of fronting in both varieties is evident, this is attributable to coarticulation and speech rate.
The study demonstrates that Tagalog /u/ in Toronto shares the same variable system as in Manila, and properties of the linguistic system can remain stable in the face of contact.
Location: B11 Morrill Hall, 159 Central Avenue, Morrill Hall, Ithaca, NY 14853-4701, USA
30th September 2026 12:20 PM
Phonetics Lab Meeting
Sam will give a tutorial on Rhythm analysis methods.
Location: B11 Morrill Hall, 159 Central Avenue, Morrill Hall, Ithaca, NY 14853-4701, USA
1st October 2026 04:30 PM
Linguistics Colloquium Speaker: Aditya Vashistha
The Department of Linguistics proudly presents Dr. Aditya Vashistha, assistant professor in the Cornell Ann S. Bowers College of Computing and Information Science.
Dr. Vashistha will speak on "Safe and Trustworthy AI for the Global Majority".
Abstract:
As AI increasingly shapes how people learn, work, and communicate, ensuring that these technologies are safe and responsive to the diversity of human experience has become critical.
This talk examines the promise of AI for diverse communities and the ways current systems fall short, including by reinforcing cultural, linguistic, gender, and disability biases and shifting users toward dominant Western norms.
I will conclude with concrete pathways toward safer and more culturally responsive AI, including community-centered safety evaluations and pluralistic approaches to AI alignment.
Bio:
Dr. Vashistha is an Assistant Professor in the Cornell Ann S. Bowers College of Computing and Information Science and the leader of the Cornell Global AI Initiative—an interdisciplinary, university-wide effort to integrate global perspectives into the design, evaluation, and governance of AI technologies. He is also a non-resident fellow at the Center for Democracy & Technology.
Dr. Vashistha designs, builds, and evaluates Globally Equitable AI technologies that improve socioeconomic outcomes for marginalized communities, particularly in South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa.
His work integrates human-centered methods, computational audits, and field evaluations to ensure that AI systems are safe, inclusive, and grounded in local contexts. His research program advances three interconnected thrusts:
- Information Equity: Understanding and countering harmful content in multilingual and socially stratified communities.
- Representational Equity: Examining and mitigating cultural, identity, and disability biases in AI through computational audits, cross-cultural studies, and new benchmarks.
- Contextual Equity: Designing and evaluating Responsible AI systems for frontline workers in health and education, with deployed systems now supporting thousands of people.
More broadly, his research lies at the intersection of Human-AI Interaction (HAI), Responsible AI, and ICT for Development (ICTD).His efforts have produced widely deployed systems that have reached more than half million people and has received multiple best paper awards. He is a recipient of the NSF CAREER Award, the Facebook Access Innovation Prize, Google and Microsoft Faculty Awards, and Cornell’s President’s and Provost’s Faculty Award for Excellence in Research, Teaching, and Service.
Before Cornell, he completed a Ph.D. in Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Washington, where his dissertation was recognized with the William Chan Memorial Dissertation Award and the WAGS/ProQuest Innovation in Technology Award.
Location: 106 Morrill Hall, 159 Central Avenue, Morrill Hall, Ithaca, NY 14853-4701, USA
3rd October 2026 08:15 AM
Annual Phonetics Lab Fall Outing at Sapsucker Woods & the Lab of Ornithology
Details of the P-Lab Fall outing at Sapsucker Woods and the Lab of Ornithology.
- *Meet at the Lab of Ornithology entrance at 8:15am
- *We'll do a beginner bird walk from 8:30-10am: be sure to wear warm clothes, and bring binoculars if you have them (I have a couple pairs)
- *After the bird walk, we'll spend some time in Visitor center
- *At 11:30 we'll head to Ole Ole for lunch
- *Friends/families/grad students outside the plab are welcome (but non lab members will have to pay for their own lunch)
- *We'll work out transportation details at Wednesday's Lab meeting
As part of the tour, you can download the Merlin Bird ID app, which analyzes bird song and automatically identifies the bird species.
Location: Cornell Lab of Ornithology
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.
/index.png)
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.
©Copyright 2020, Cornell University