The Penn Phonetics Laboratory
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 modelling, phonetic patterns and variation in
large speech corpora, integration of phonetics and speech technology, etc.
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 Speech Talk (formerly 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.
Jianjing Kuang, Assistant Professor (Ph.D. UCLA, 2013)
Jianjing Kuang's recent
research areas include the multidimensionality of tonal contrasts, phonation (production, perception and phonological representation), laryngeal articulations across languages,
experimental fieldwork (Tibeto-Burman, Mayan, Hmong-Mien languages), computational modeling (mapping between production and perception), and prosody (intonation patterns and prosody in sentence processing).
Phonetics Lab Students
Mao-Hsu Chen, Sunghye Cho, Eric Doty, Gudrun (Duna) Gylfadottir, Yong-cheol Lee,
Hilary Prichard, Gayeon Son,
Meredith Tamminga, Jingjing Tan.
We are currently in the process of updating the lab website. Check back soon for an update on current work being done in the "p.lab".
Previous work included:
- the prosody, semantics and pragmatics of cue words (Catherine Lai)
- cues in the production and perception of Vietnamese vowels (Giang Nguyen)
- cues to consonant voicing in infant directed speech (Kyle Gorman)
- acquisition of the post-vocalic consonant voicing effect and intrisic vowel durations (Josh Tauberer)
- automatic dialect classification in American English (Keelan Evanini)
- cross-language recognition of speech errors (Catherine Lai and Kyle Gorman)
- the syntactic distributions of unfilled pauses (Josh Tauberer)
Past publications include:
- 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.
