Eleanor Chodroff

🤯 Phonetic Universal Uncovered! 🎤
We analyzed over 60,000 speakers across 75 languages and confirmed a universal phonetic bias: High vowels (like /i, u/) are consistently spoken with a slightly higher pitch (F0) than low vowels (/a/).

SCiL 2026 SCiL 2026July 3rd and 4thSan Diego, CA

For everyone working on the intersections between linguistic and computational research, consider submitting to the upcoming SCiL! We're very excited that it will be co-located with ACL 2026 as a workshop, and we've also received NSF funding to help cover costs.

sites.google.com/view/scil2026

Dark blue background, with six puzzle pieces on the right in various shades of blue. On the left, the text 'Interspeech Challenges' in white, with Interspeech 2026 logo above and website interspeech.org below.

Get ready to tackle one of the #Interspeech2026 Challenges! Check out the accepted Challenge Proposals 👉 interspeech2026.org/en-AU/pages/... – detailed information to come!

Deadline 4 Jan: Postdoc, variability and vowel harmony, metaphony (phonetic and psycholinguistic approaches), Potsdam (w/ A. Gafos) docs.google.com/document/d/1...

To the right, a toy koala wearing a lanyard and sitting on a lectern in front of a projector screen. To the left, a dark blue background with text 'Special Session Announcement', with Interspeech 2026 logo above and website interspeech.org below.

An extraordinary response to the call for Special Sessions for #Interspeech2026! Consider submitting your paper to one of these accepted themed sessions 👉 interspeech2026.org/en-AU/pages/... (and stay tuned for more details!)

The Spoken Language group @bcbl.bsky.social is currently recruiting for these positions:

👉PhD students (expressions of interest are welcome on a rolling basis)
👉Postdoctoral Researcher (start date: Nov '26 - Sep '27) tinyurl.com/3um3bjze
👉Research Assistant tinyurl.com/y5uebra6

Please share ☺️

Friendly PSA: we are currently in the purgatory period of continental daylight savings changes when Central Europe and North America (East Coast) are 5 hours apart instead of the usual 6.

a peek through fall foliage to some people at the University of Pennsylvania, photo by Eric Sucar

Seeking applications from recent PhDs in neuro, psych, ling, philo, comp sci, or other cog sci discipline, for our MindCORE Fellowship.

MindCORE is an interdisciplinary effort at Penn to understand human intelligence and behavior.

Apply by Dec 1: mindcore.sas.upenn.edu/post-doctora...

Please join @mariamaly.bsky.social and me October 30th! We'll help you navigate the confusing world of peer review.

A memorial service, followed by a reception, will take place on Friday, 14 November at 5:00 PM in the Aula (KOL-G-201) of the main building of the University of Zurich (Rämistrasse 71, 8006 Zurich).

recent picture of Martin Volk

It is with deep sorrow that we bid farewell to Prof. Dr. Martin Volk, who passed away on 15 September 2025 at the age of 64 after a brief and sudden illness. www.cl.uzh.ch/en/about-us/...

Postdoc (flexible start): child language development across different populations and contexts, methods including behavioral studies, large-scale data analysis, and/or computational modeling. M. Cychosz, Linguistics, Stanford Univ. postdocs.stanford.edu/prospective/...

Intrinsic vowel duration Hosted on the Open Science Framework

Data and analyses here:
osf.io/wafut/
huggingface.co/datasets/pac...

The differences are small but consistent in direction, supporting a biomechanical account critically tied to uniform phonetic targets across vowels. At the same time, variation in effect size across languages suggests speakers differ in how strongly this uniformity is realized

Our findings:
📉 Clear crosslinguistic bias—high vowels are shorter than low vowels
➡️ But no systematic difference between high front vs. high back vowels

Previous explanations have focused on two explanations:
🗣️Automatic accounts
👂Speaker control

As a novel contribution, we reinterpret intrinsic vowel duration as a statistical universal emerging from the competing pressures of target uniformity and enhancement

We provide a large-scale crosslinguistic corpus analysis of intrinsic vowel duration – the observation that high vowels (like /i/ or /u/) tend to be shorter than low vowels (like /a/)

Our dataset:
✅ 60+ languages
✅ 16 language families
✅ Thousands of speakers

Excited to share our new preprint with @mzhang89.bsky.social : “A crosslinguistic corpus phonetic analysis of intrinsic vowel duration” 🎉

🔗 osf.io/preprints/ps...

📢PhD fellowships

The Spoken Language group at #BCBL (Spain) offers sponsorship for the #INPhINIT Predoctoral Fellowships

Potential PhD projects can be related to:
🗣️Speech perception
🧠Language learning

ℹ️Info about the position and application process: tinyurl.com/2kcfsjr3

📆Deadline: October 30

Thank you!!!

Perception of Segment Duration in Sentence Contexts A category judgment technique has been used to quantify the preferred duration for phonetic segments in words placed in different syntactic environments. Sentences containing the stressed vowel /i/ of...

Does anyone have a PDF of Klatt and Cooper (1975) "Perception of segment duration in sentence contexts" that goes beyond the first two pages? (link.springer.com/chapter/10.1...)

pacscilab/VoxCommunis at main We’re on a journey to advance and democratize artificial intelligence through open source and open science.

✅Similarity scores: huggingface.co/datasets/pac...

📄Paper: www.isca-archive.org/interspeech_...

💻Code: github.com/pacscilab/CV...

💫This was joint work with @mzhang89.bsky.social, Aref Farhadipour, Annie Baker, Jiachen Ma, and Bogdan Pricop

Pairs below this were more likely perceived as different speakers and above, as the same speaker. Of course there’s no ground truth, so you can also choose your own threshold

The similarity scores, paper, and code can be found at the below links

Happy data cleaning 😊

We ran automatic speaker verification (ResNet-293 trained w/ multilingual VoxBlink2) to obtain similarity scores among files for each client ID. Based on previous thresholds and a perceptual evaluation, we found an optimal threshold of ~0.35–0.40 for same vs diff speakers

Interspeech 2025 poster on Quantifying and reducing speaker heterogeneity within the Common Voice Corpus

🗣️Mozilla Common Voice users!🗣️

Important notice: the client ID does not always correspond to a single speaker ID! Every so often, a single client ID contains more than one speaker’s voice. Our #Interspeech2025 paper examines the extent of this problem and proposes a solution

🚨Postdoctoral fellowship in corpus phonetics / data science for speech with me and Ann Bradlow. Position is open immediately. Apply now! 🚨 Details: faculty.wcas.northwestern.edu/matt-goldric...

Now that school is starting for lots of folks, it's time for a new release of Speech and Language Processing! Jim and I added all sorts of material for the August 2025 release! With slides to match! Check it out here: web.stanford.edu/~jurafsky/sl...

Had such a great time presenting our tutorial on Interpretability Techniques for Speech Models at #Interspeech2025! 🔍

For anyone looking for an introduction to the topic, we've now uploaded all materials to the website: interpretingdl.github.io/speech-inter...

Thank you the team at Leiden University for the opportunity to present on working with large-scale speech corpus.

🖥️Slides are available at: chenzixu.rbind.io/talk/corpus/.

#Corpusphonetics #speechcorpus #linguistics

I’m happy to share that my paper with Jeff Heinz on “the blueprint model of production” is finally published online in Phonology: www.cambridge.org/core/journal...