The Penn Phonetics Laboratory

The phonetics group at Penn emphasizes the interdisciplinary and experimental nature of phonetics in both teaching and research. The group is engaged in a wide range of research topics, including laboratory studies of speech production and perception, prosody modeling, phonetic patterns and variation in large speech corpora, integration of phonetics and speech technology, etc.

The lab will be hosting a workshop on New tools and methods for very-large-scale phonetics research on January 28-30, 2011. You can find out more on the workshop page linked above.

The lab develops the Penn Phonetics Lab Forced Aligner, an automatic phonetic alignment toolkit.

The lab also develops P2TK, the Penn Phonetics Toolkit, a collection of Python scripts and other tools to facilitate speech research.

The lab hosts a weekly lunch meeting called Splunch (Speech Lunch).

Phonetics Lab Faculty

Mark Liberman, Trustee Professor of Phonetics and Director of LDC (Ph.D. MIT, 1975)

Mark Liberman's recent research areas include the phonology and phonetics of lexical tone, and its relationship to intonation; gestural, prosodic, morphological and syntactic ways of marking focus, and their use in discourse; formal models for linguistic annotation; information retrieval and information extraction from text.

Jiahong Yuan, Assistant Professor (Ph.D. Cornell, 2004)

Jiahong Yuan's recent research areas include speech prosody, with particular attention to tone, intonation, and their interaction; corpus phonetics; and the integration of speech technology in phonetics research.

Phonetics Lab Students

Josef Fruehwald, Kyle Gorman, Catherine Lai, Yong-cheol Lee, Laurel MacKenzie, Rebecca Marsh, Satoshi Nambu, James Mesbur, Giang Nguyen, Hilary Prichard, GaYeon Son, Meredith Tamminga, Joshua Tauberer, Yanyan Sui.

The students in the "p.lab" have recently worked on

• the prosody, semantics and pragmatics of cue words (Catherine)
• cues in the production and perception of Vietnamese vowels (Giang)
• cues to consonant voicing in infant directed speech (Kyle)
• acquisition of the post-vocalic consonant voicing effect and intrisic vowel durations (Josh)
• automatic dialect classification in American English (Keelan)
• cross-language recognition of speech errors (Catherine and Kyle)
• the syntactic distributions of unfilled pauses (Josh)

...and have recently published...

• Lai, Catherine, Yanyan Sui and Jiahong Yuan. 2010. A Corpus Study of the Prosody of Polysyllabic Words in Mandarin Chinese. In Proceedings of Speech Prosody 2010.
• Tauberer, Joshua and Keelan Evanini. 2009. Intrinsic vowel duration and the post-vocalic voicing effect: Some evidence from dialects of North American English. In Proceedings of Interspeech 2009. Short-listed for best student paper.
• Lai, Catherine. 2009. Perceiving Surprise on Cue Words: Prosody and Semantics Interact on Right and Really. In Proceedings of Interspeech 2009.
• Lai, Catherine. 2008. Prosodic Cues for Backchannels and Short Questions: Really? In Barbosa, P. A., Madureira, S., and Reis, C. (Eds.) Proceedings of the Speech Prosody 2008 Conference, May 6-9, 2008. Campinas, Brazil.
• Tauberer, Joshua. 2008. Predicting Intrasentential Pauses: Is Syntactic Structure Useful? In Barbosa, P. A., Madureira, S., and Reis, C. (Eds.) Proceedings of the Speech Prosody 2008 Conference, May 6-9, 2008. Campinas, Brazil.
• Evanini, Keelan. 2008. Classifying and clustering dialects of North American English. Proceedings of NESCAI 2008.

Phonetics Alumni

Charles Boberg, Jeff Conn, Keelan Evanini, Shengli Feng, Beth Ann Hockey, Mark Karan, Arturs Karins, Eun-Suk Ko, Naomi Nagy.