Category Archives: Resources

This is where we post all of the different and resources created in the lab.

LexicalCharacteristics.jl: A Julia package for lexical characteristics

The LexicalCharacteristics.jl package provides convenient functions for calculating some commonly used lexical characteristics. At present, it will calculate phonological neighborhood density, uniqueness point, and phonotactic probability. The Julia programming language runs quickly, so using the functions provided here should work faster than implementations written in Python or R. An additional speedup for phonological neighborhood density is gained by using a data structure called a vantage-point tree.

For more information, check out the documentation, or visit the code repository on GitLab. The software is licensed for use under the MIT software license.

PraatDocExtractor

This program will extract documentation strings in a Praat script and write them to a Markdown file, in the fashion of Doxygen, Roxygen, and Javadoc. In particular, the commenting style is inspired by Roxgygen’s, as Praat comments already use the octothorpe to denote comments.

For the sake of convenience, there are two implementations, one in Python 3, and the other the Praat scripting language.

The GitLab repository is available at https://gitlab.com/maetshju/PraatDocExtractor.

Praat Force-Aligned Word Presenter

Developed for use in pre-processing stimuli for experiments, this Praat script will present all WAV and TextGrid pairs in a directory that have been passed through a forced aligner tool. This allows a user to more quickly and regularly check the alignment of their files, and stores the results of the alignment in a file as well for later reference.

This script is licensed under version 2 of the GNU General Public License.

phonTools

An R package called phonTools which is intended to facilitate phonetics work in R. There are several functions which may be useful for the normalization and display of vowel data, for performing statistical analyses, and for the creation, display or modification of WAV sound files. Some examples and additional information for some of the functions included in the package is available at: http://www.santiagobarreda.com/rscripts.html. The package is open to modifying functions, adding functionalities or adding any new functions that might be generally useful to people so please feel free to contact sbarreda@ualberta.ca if you have any questions, comments or suggestions.

Item Extractor

This is a script that extracts items coded on an interval tier. It extracts labeled items in the tier and saves them as a WAV file with the label as the file name.

  1. To run this script, open the textgrid and sound file in Praat.
  2. Then, highlight the relevant textgrid and soundfile.
  3. Go to the File menu and choose Open script… You will get a dialogue box with the script in it.
  4. Specify the tier number where you have labeled your items.
  5. Specify the name of the file (the script will save the output file in the same directory as the script).
  6. Press ok and the script should do the rest of the work.
  7. All of the new sound files will be saved in the same directory as the script.

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