Laboratory phonology is an approach to phonology that emphasizes the synergy between phonological theory and scientific experiments, including laboratory studies of human speech and experiments on the acquisition and productivity of phonological patterns. The central goal of laboratory phonology is "gaining an understanding of the relationship between the cognitive and physical aspects of human speech"[1] through the use of an interdisciplinary approach that promotes scholarly exchange across disciplines, bridging linguistics with psychology, electrical engineering, computer science, and other fields.[2][3] Although spoken speech has represented the major area of research, the investigation of sign languages and manual signs as encoding elements is also included in laboratory phonology.[4] Important antecedents of the field include work by Kenneth N. Stevens and Gunnar Fant on the acoustic theory of speech production, Ilse Lehiste's work on prosody and intonation, and Peter Ladefoged's work on typological variation and methods for data capture. Current research in laboratory phonology draws heavily on the theories of metrical phonology and autosegmental phonology which are sought to be tested with help of experimental procedures, in laboratory settings, or through linguistic data collection at field sites, and through evaluation with statistical methods, such as exploratory data analysis.[5]
The term laboratory phonology was coined by Janet Pierrehumbert in the preparation phrase of the first biennial Conference on Laboratory Phonology (LabPhon), whose main goal was to connect the subfields of phonology with those of phonetics.[2] Since then, the importance of LabPhon has increased significantly, as evidenced by the strong attendance at the biennial conferences.
1 2 Beckman, M. and J. Kingston Introduction. In J. Kingston and M. Beckman (eds.) Papers in Laboratory Phonology I: Between the Grammar and the Physics of Speech. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 1–16.
↑ Pierrehumbert, J., M. Beckman, and D.R. Ladd (2000).Conceptual Foundations of Phonology as a Laboratory Science. In N. Burton-Roberts, P. Carr and G.J. Docherty (eds.) Phonological Knowledge: Conceptual and Empirical Issues. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Pages 273-303.
Phonology is the branch of linguistics that studies how languages systematically organize their phonemes or, for sign languages, their constituent parts of signs. The term can also refer specifically to the sound or sign system of a particular language variety. At one time, the study of phonology related only to the study of the systems of phonemes in spoken languages, but now it may relate to any linguistic analysis either:
Psycholinguistics or psychology of language is the study of the interrelation between linguistic factors and psychological aspects. The discipline is mainly concerned with the mechanisms by which language is processed and represented in the mind and brain; that is, the psychological and neurobiological factors that enable humans to acquire, use, comprehend, and produce language.
Experimental psychology refers to work done by those who apply experimental methods to psychological study and the underlying processes. Experimental psychologists employ human participants and animal subjects to study a great many topics, including sensation, perception, memory, cognition, learning, motivation, emotion; developmental processes, social psychology, and the neural substrates of all of these.
Janet Pierrehumbert is Professor of Language Modelling in the Oxford e-Research Centre at the University of Oxford and a senior research fellow of Trinity College, Oxford. She developed an intonational model which includes a grammar of intonation patterns and an explicit algorithm for calculating pitch contours in speech, as well as an account of intonational meaning. It has been widely influential in speech technology, psycholinguistics, and theories of language form and meaning. Pierrehumbert is also affiliated with the New Zealand Institute of Language Brain and Behaviour at the University of Canterbury.
Patricia Ann Keating is an American linguist and noted phonetician. She is distinguished research professor emeritus at UCLA.
Catherine Phebe Browman was an American linguist and speech scientist. She received her Ph.D. in linguistics from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) in 1978. Browman was a research scientist at Bell Laboratories in New Jersey (1967–1972). While at Bell Laboratories, she was known for her work on speech synthesis using demisyllables. She later worked as researcher at Haskins Laboratories in New Haven, Connecticut (1982–1998). She was best known for developing, with Louis Goldstein, of the theory of articulatory phonology, a gesture-based approach to phonological and phonetic structure. The theoretical approach is incorporated in a computational model that generates speech from a gesturally-specified lexicon. Browman was made an honorary member of the Association for Laboratory Phonology.
Mary Esther Beckman is a Professor Emerita of Linguistics at the Ohio State University.
In linguistics, well-formedness is the quality of a clause, word, or other linguistic element that conforms to the grammar of the language of which it is a part. Well-formed words or phrases are grammatical, meaning they obey all relevant rules of grammar. In contrast, a form that violates some grammar rule is ill-formed and does not constitute part of the language.
George Nickerson Clements was an American linguist specializing in phonology.
The Modular Online Growth and Use of Language (MOGUL) project is the cover term name for any research on language carried out using the Modular Cognition Framework (MCF).
ToBI is a set of conventions for transcribing and annotating the prosody of speech. The term "ToBI" is sometimes used to refer to the conventions used for describing American English specifically, which was the first ToBI system, developed by Mary Beckman and Janet Pierrehumbert, among others. Other ToBI systems have been defined for a number of languages; for example, J-ToBI refers to the ToBI conventions for Tokyo Japanese, and an adaptation of ToBI to describe Dutch intonation was developed by Carlos Gussenhoven, and called ToDI. Another variation of ToBI, called IViE, was established in 1998 to enable comparison between several dialects of British English.
The Association for Laboratory Phonology is a non-profit professional society for researchers interested in the sound structure of language. It was founded to promote the scientific study of all aspects of phonetics and phonology of oral and sign languages through scholarly exchange across disciplines and through the use of a hybrid methodology. The founding and honorary members are Amalia Arvaniti, Mary Beckman, Cathi Best, Catherine Browman, Jennifer S. Cole, Mariapaola D'Imperio, Louis M. Goldstein, José Ignacio Hualde, Patricia Keating, John Kingston, D.R. Ladd, Peter Ladefoged, Janet Pierrehumbert, Caroline Smith, Paul Warren, and Douglas Whalen. The Association is an international body open to scholars world-wide, and currently has over 100 members.
Jennifer Sandra Cole is a professor linguistics, Director of the Prosody and Speech Dynamics Lab, and Chair of the Department of Linguistics at Northwestern University. Her research uses experimental and computational methods to study the sound structure of language. She was previously Professor of Linguistics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Professor Cole served as the founding General Editor of Laboratory Phonology (2009–2015) and a founding member of the Association for Laboratory Phonology.
Ilse Lehiste was an Estonian-born American linguist, author of many studies in phonetics.
Pitch accent is a term used in autosegmental-metrical theory for local intonational features that are associated with particular syllables. Within this framework, pitch accents are distinguished from both the abstract metrical stress and the acoustic stress of a syllable. Different languages specify different relationships between pitch accent and stress placement.
Julia Hirschberg is an American computer scientist noted for her research on computational linguistics and natural language processing.
Donca Steriade is a Romanian-American professor of Linguistics at MIT, specializing in phonological theory.
Osamu Fujimura 藤村靖 was a Japanese physicist, phonetician and linguist, recognized as one of the pioneers of speech science. Fujimura was also known for his influential work in the diverse field of speech-related studies including acoustics, phonetics/phonology, instrumentation techniques, speech production mechanisms, and computational/theoretical linguistics.
Phonological Knowledge: Conceptual and Empirical Issues is a 2000 book edited by Noel Burton-Roberts, Philip Carr and Gerard Docherty in which the authors deal with different approaches to describing and explaining the nature of phonological knowledge in the speaker’s grammar.
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