Current Grant-Supported Projects

Past Grant-Supported Projects

Dissertation projects

Other Projects
 
About running experiments in the Phonetics Lab

Prof. Peter Ladefoged and Dr. Barbara Blankenship received a grant for $159,610 from the National Science Foundation to prepare a digital archive of the vast collection of phonetic field data gathered by Ladefoged and his UCLA Linguistics colleagues over the past five decades.  The project has been carried out in collaboration with several UCLA undergraduates, who are compiling an archive of recordings.  Prof. Russ Schuh has taken over as PI of this project since Peter Ladefoged's death, and the work is expected to continue through summer 2008.

Prof. Pat Keating and several students (especially Kuniko Nielsen) have been part of "Bases of Normal and Disordered Reading", NIH grant HD29891 to Frank Manis at USC.  The co-PIs include not only the collaborators on the previous generation of this project - Mark Seidenberg of U Wisconsin-Madison, and Pat Keating - but also Zhong-Lin Lu of USC for vision and neuroimaging studies.  This project used the lab's facilities for preparation of perception experiments, which are posted here.  This project will end in Fall 2007.

Prof. Pat Keating, with Prof. Abeer Alwan in EE , Prof. Jody Kreiman in Head & Neck Surgery, and Prof. Christina Esposito of Macalester College, has received NSF grant BCS-0720304, "Production and Perception of Linguistic Voice Quality", beginning Sept. 1 2007.

Pat Keating and several students (Rebecca Brown Scarborough, Kuniko Yasu Nielsen, Taehong Cho, Marco Baroni; and others employed directly by the House Ear Institute) were part of NSF grant 9996088 to Lynne Bernstein of the House Ear Institute, "KDI: Segmental and Prosodic Optical Phonetics for Human and Machine Speech Processing."   This project used the lab's Carstens AG-100 Articulograph.

Bruce Hayes had  NSF grant 9910686, and Adam Albright, Argelia Andrade, and Stephen Wilson were part of the project.  Although not a phonetic project, this project used the computers and sound booth of the Phonetics Lab for perception experiments.

Taehong Cho had NSF grant 001716 to Pat Keating (as dissertation advisor), "Doctoral/Dissertation Research: Effects of Prosody on Articulation in English."  This project used the lab's Carsten AG-100.

Sun-Ah Jun (and Sahyang Kim, Hyuck-Joon Lee, Minjung Son, Moto Ueyama and undergrads Olivia Martinez and Wendy Hayashi) was part of NIMH grant 1R01MH56118 to Terry Au of the Psychology Department, "Language Acquisition--Timing and Nature of Output".  This project used the lab's acoustic analysis facilities.

Peter Ladefoged & Ian Maddieson had  NSF 9319705 - "Phonetic Structures of Endangered Languages".  Results from this project (and previous related grants) are included in the Phonetic Database available on this site.

Pat Keating had NSF 9511118 - "Effects of Prosodic Positions on Consonant Articulation"

Pat Keating and Richard Wright were part of NIH R01HD29891 to Frank Manis at USC - "Perceptual, Linguistic and Computational Bases of Dyslexia"

This page is now our outlet for phonetics dissertations.  [Until about 1995, dissertations from the Phonetics Lab were published in the Working Papers in Phonetics series (the last was Hagiwara 1995, which was WPP #90).  After that, some but not all dissertations from the lab (Sands, Wright, Cho), and some phonology dissertations of interest to phoneticians (Silverman, Jun, Kaun), appeared in the Linguistics Department series.]  The Linguistics Department website provides a more complete list of students' downloadable dissertations, as well as some masters theses.  Any dissertations not available in one of these ways (WPP, department series, on-line) are simply not available through the department or the phonetics lab.  They were filed with the university Research Library and should be available through University Microfilms, or perhaps directly from the author. The Linguistics Department is planning to post electronic scans of all filed dissertations, but we do not know when they will be available online.

Kuniko Yasu Nielsen (2008) (done, waiting for pdf to post)

Sameer Khan (2008), Intonational Phonology and Focus Prosody of Bengali

Christina Esposito (2006), The Effects of Linguistic Experience on the Perception of Phonation (pdf file)

Tim Arbisi-Kelm (2006), An Intonational Analysis of Disfluency Patterns in Stuttering (pdf file)

Heidi Fleischhacker MacBride (2005), Similarity in Phonology: Evidence from Reduplication and Loan Adaptation (pdf file)

Ying Lin (2005), Learning Features and Segments from Waveforms: A Statistical Model of Early Phonological Acquisition (pdf file)

Rebecca Scarborough (2004), Coarticulation and the structure of the lexicon (pdf file)

Sahyang Kim (2004), The role of prosodic phrasing in Korean word segmentation (pdf file)

Mary Baltazani (2002), Quantifier scope and the role of intonation in Greek (pdf file) 

Melissa Epstein (2002), Voice Quality and Prosody in English (pdf file) (data file) (abstract)

Taehong Cho (2001), Effects of Prosody on Articulation in English (pdf file) (abstract)

Jie Zhang (2001), The Effects of Duration and Sonority on Contour Tone Distribution--Typological Survey and Formal Analysis (pdf file) (abstract)

Moto Ueyama (2000, in Applied Linguistics), Prosodic Transfer: An Acoustic  Study of L2 English vs. L2 Japanese (pdf file) (abstract)

Tetsuo Harada (1999, in Applied Linguistics), The Acquisition of Segmental Timing by Children in a Japanese Immersion Program (pdf file) (abstract)

Barbara Blankenship (1997), The timecourse of breathiness and laryngealization in vowels (pdf file) (abstract)

Peter Ladefoged's book Phonetic Data Analysis: An introduction to fieldwork and instrumental phonetics was published in summer 2003.   He and Jenny Ladefoged  also revised and consolidated the Hypercard/web/CD materials, including materials from Sounds of the World's Languages and Vowels and Consonants (published by Blackwells in 2001), into a single website.

Two other books from members of the lab have been published recently:

• Bruce Hayes, Robert Kirchner, and Donca Steriade (eds.) Phonetic Bases for Phonological Markedness, Cambridge University Press  (2004)
• Sun-Ah Jun (ed.) Prosodic Transcription and Typology: a Unified Approach, Oxford University Press  (2005)

• Roy Becker-Kristal
  
• Molly Shilman
  

In general, results of older projects, including masters theses, were formerly published in our series Working Papers in Phonetics.  There were 3 issues published in 2002; however no further hardcopy publication is planned.  Instead, WPP became an electronic publication in Fall 2004, with issue #103.  

About Running experiments in the Phonetics Lab

Not only members of the lab, but members of the Linguistics Department, and indeed of the larger academic community, are welcome to use the facilities of the lab for their research.  Please consult our Facilities page for information about available facilities, including instructions for many of them.  For example, see the Perception page linked from Facilities for information about our various options for running perception experiments, instructional material about Psyscope scripts, links to existing Matlab scripts, and instructional material on using SPSS to analyze data.

Experiments that are done as part of a course do not require Human Subjects approval, but experiments done as research (including masters theses and dissertations) do require prior approval.  All users of the lab, including those from outside the Linguistics Department, are responsible for obtaining their own approval.  Information and forms are available from the Office for the Protection of Research Subjects.  If you are only making audio recordings, your work may already be covered by an approval obtained by Pat Keating; contact her to discuss.