Phonetics
Phonetics is the science of speech. It studies the articulation, acoustics,
and perception of speech sounds.
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 in large speech
corpora, integration of phonetic knowledge in speech synthesis/recognition,
etc.
's recent research in phonetics has focused on
African languages, with particular attention to tone in Igbo and Yoruba
and to the word-level phonolÂogy of Mawu, a phonologically unusual Mande
language. Very recently he has been able to reach some interesting
general conclusions regarding the alignment of tone contours and
segmental representations, working jointly with Akinbiyi Akinlabi of
Rutgers University.
The research of focuses on speech prosody,
with particular attention to tone, intonation, and their interaction.
His work combines cross-disciplinary expertise in linguistics
(phonological analysis and phonetic experimentation), psychology (speech
and prosody perception), engineering (digital signal processing and
speech technologies), and computer science (programming and machine
learning techniques).
The phonetics group holds a weekly lunch-time meeting called
Splunch
(speech lunch).