Alberta Phonetics Laboratory

We are recruiting participants for a speech aging experiment. You can find the relevant information below: Audio RecordingParticipants must be native speakers of English. Participants must be between the ages of 65 and 85 . What does participation include? * Basic hearing test* Participant recording of your side of a telephone conversation with a friend or relative and…

Check out our new article on acoustic distance!https://doi.org/10.1121/10.0009584 Using phonological neighborhood density has been a common method to quantify lexical competition. It is useful and convenient but has shortcomings that are worth reconsidering. The present study quantifies the effects of lexical competition during spoken word recognition using acoustic distance and acoustic absement rather than phonological…

The first paper of my dissertation investigates variability in the production of intervocalic alveolar taps in the Spanish of Madrid using the Nijmegen Corpus of Casual Spanish. Automated methods were used on the full data-set of almost 30,000 taps, followed by manual analysis and coding of a random 10% of the data. The first goal…

Voiceless nasal consonants are typologically rare in the world’s languages. The present study investigates the acoustic realization of reported voiceless nasals in the Miyako Ryukyuan dialect Ikema. Voiceless nasals in Ikema occur word-initially and word-medially as part of a geminate or consonant cluster, and are phonemically distinct from modal voiced nasals. Initial observation of collected…

The present study investigates and compares the acoustic characteristics of uh [ə] and um [əm] spontaneous speech. The data comes from a corpus of Western Canadian conversational spontaneous speech. Measures of duration, fundamental frequency, F1 and F2 were extracted from 1,048 instances of um and uh. Results indicate that longer durations occurred when markers preceded…

In this overview, we describe literature on how speech production and speech perception change in healthy or normal aging across the adult lifespan. In the production section, we review acoustic characteristics that have been investigated as potentially distinguishing younger and older adults. In the speech perception section studies concerning speaker age estimation and those investigating…

Multiple measures of vowel overlap have been proposed that use F1, F2, and duration to calculate the degree of overlap between vowel categories. The present study assesses four of these measures: the spectral overlap assessment metric [SOAM; Wassink (2006). J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 119(4), 2334–2350], the a posteriori probability (APP)-based metric [Morrison (2008). J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 123(1), 37–40],…

Linguistics student pinpoints differences in Western Canadian dialects Vowel pronunciation varies between urban and rural populations, study shows. Click here for Folio & CBC articles. You can also watch the CBC interview here and the CityNews interview here.

The first version of our Massive Auditory Lexical Decision database has been released. You can read the article here and check out the data here.

Thank you for your interest in our paid experiment! We’re investigating how people talk, understand speech, and identify words in collaboration with the School of Human Communication Disorders at Dalhousie University. Who: monolingual native speakers of English (meaning using English only at home for the first five years of your life, experience studying a non-English language as a…