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 phonol­ogy 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).