Lancaster University Phonetics Lab

Very happy to have been awarded an APEX grant for a project on “Interpretable acoustic-articulatory relations in speech production” w/ co-investigators Anton Ragni & Aneta Stefanovska. The plan is to do some interesting speech research at the intersection of linguistics, physics & computer science!

Plotting your spectral slices in R will soon be a lot easier!

Needed to take my daughter into work for a short time today so while there our amazing @phoneticslab.bsky.social let her ultrasound her tongue! She thought it was very, very cool.

Sam Schmück awarded Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellowship - Lancaster University Congratulations to Sam Schmück for being awarded a highly prestigious Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellowship!

We are very excited that Samuel Schmück has been awarded a Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellowship for a great project on speech analytics and under-represented language varieties in speech technology. Many congratulations Sam!

@samschmueck.bsky.social @leverhulme.ac.uk

We're looking forward to INTERSPEECH 2025!! @interspeech.bsky.social #Interspeech2025

New exciting tongue contour modelling methods of ultrasound data!

stefanocoretta.github.io/mv_uti/

And also a paper accepted at CogSci 2025! ✨

➡️ Phonetic accommodation and inhibition in a dynamic neural field model
arxiv.org/abs/2502.01210

Photo of Sam Kirkham giving a talk. He is standing in front of a white wall and pointing towards a slide that shows results on phonetic accommodation.

As part of the #ViTraLiP transnational course, our virtual guest was @samkirkham.bsky.social from Lancaster University. During our exchange in #Paris, we were able to attend his talk at the #SRPP colloquium. Thanks to @lppparis.bsky.social for inviting us! Read more here: tinyurl.com/vitralip.

2. Nosey: Open-source hardware for acoustic nasalance - led by PhD student Maya Dewhurst, with Jack Collins, Roy Alderton & Sam Kirkham

(psst there's 3D printing in there)

We've got 2 papers accepted to #Interspeech2025 (although you'll only see my collaborators and not me at Rotterdam 🥲):

1. Articulatory strategy in vowel production as a basis for speaker discrimination - with Pat Strycharczuk & Sam Kirkham

@phoneticslab.bsky.social
@lancslinguistics.bsky.social

✨Discovering dynamical laws for speech gestures ✨

➡️ I’m delighted to announce my new article out today in Cognitive Science, where I discover simple mathematical laws that govern articulatory control in speech.

🔗 onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10....

@cogscisociety.bsky.social

Quantifying Between-Speaker Variation in Ultrasound Tongue Imaging Data This article outlines a quantitative, between-group comparison of tongue shapes using ultrasound tongue imaging, one of the vocal tract imaging techni …

Hot off the press! My tutorial on ultrasound data collection & analysis is now out. Open Access. Part of a special issue in the Journal of the Phonetic Society of Japan, with lots of other cool studies. Articulatory phonetics is going strong in Japan!

www.jstage.jst.go.jp/article/onse...

We had a great time at Campus in the City last week, where hundreds of people engaged with our activities on beatboxing ultrasound, language escape rooms, gender representation in animated films, Lancashire accent quiz, nasal visualisation, and more!

Sam Kirkham
Discovering dynamical laws for speech gestures
https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.04849

A group of 10 colleagues in a room. Most of us are wearing red Lancaster Phonetics Lab t-shirts. I am holding an ultrasound probe and Sam Kirkham is holding a nasalance device.

We had a brilliant time at Lancaster University's public engagement festival, Campus in the City, yesterday! We engaged with 260 people in Morecambe with ultrasound, nasalance, accent quizzes, gender and language, and a grammar escape room! @lancslinguistics.bsky.social @phoneticslab.bsky.social

I wrote some software that visualises real-time nasalance for our @phoneticslab.bsky.social public engagement event this week!

We use two microphones to capture oral and nasal signals, separated by a baffle, and map each signal's amplitude to a visual representation of the face!

Our new paper on "Dimensionality Reduction in Lingual Articulation of Vowels" is now out in Language & Speech!

How should we quantify tongue shape in vowel production? We evaluate various measures and identify multi-dimensional measures for vowel analysis.

journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

A photograph showing the book spines for Volumes 1 to 4 of Foundational Papers in Complexity Science.

Spring reading! Looking forward to (slowly) making it through the four volumes of “Foundational papers in complexity science” @sfiscience.bsky.social

Great SRPP (@lppparis.bsky.social) talk on speech modelling by @samkirkham.bsky.social (@phoneticslab.bsky.social) 👅 A very clear overview of why we should care about modelling and the considerations that need to be made when creating new models. 🧠

Nasal coarticulation in Lombard speech Speaking in noisy environments entails a multitude of adaptations to speech production. Such modifications are expected to reduce gestural overlap bet…

New open access paper in Speech Communication on “nasal coarticulation in Lombard speech”: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

I argue that, in Lombard speech, coarticulatory vowel nasality falls amid a compressed range of nasalisation, but coarticulation is maintained

@phoneticslab.bsky.social

A selfie of me standing in front of the Jagiellonian University banner. The banner shows a modern university building where I gave my talk. The banner has a blue background showing the university logo. The weather is cold at the moment so I am wearing a black winter coat, purple scarf, and a grey hat.

It was my great privilege to give a talk yesterday at Jagiellonian University in Kraków, hosted by the Language Documentation Centre, Department of General and Indo-European Linguistics.
@lancslinguistics.bsky.social
@phoneticslab.bsky.social

Scaling laws for nonlinear dynamical models of articulatory control Dynamical theories of speech use computational models of articulatory control to generate quantitative predictions and advance understanding of speech dynamics.

Scaling laws for nonlinear dynamical models of articulatory control

➡️ My new article out today in JASA Express Letters, in which I present some new advances on nonlinear task dynamic models of articulatory speech movements.

🔗 doi.org/10.1121/10.0...

@asa-news.bsky.social

A man is standing on a green grassy mountainside. He is wearing a beige t-shirt, sunglasses, and a rucksack. The sky is blue and the grass is very green.

We are delighted to welcome Dr Anton Malmi, who has started a 3-year postdoc in @phoneticslab.bsky.social @lancslinguistics.bsky.social funded by the Estonian Research Council! Anton will be investigating the acquisition of palatalisation in Estonian children using ultrasound tongue imaging.

Articulatory phonetics in the market: combining public engagement with ultrasound data collection This paper is a methodological contribution outlining an approach we have developed to recording ultrasound tongue imaging and audio research data as part of public engagement work. The paper is based...

New paper out with colleagues from @phoneticslab.bsky.social
'Articulatory phonetics in the market: combining public engagement with ultrasound data collection'
doi.org/10.1515/ling...
@samkirkham.bsky.social @takayukinagamine.bsky.social @pamelaforster.bsky.social
@justinjhlo.bsky.social

Just posted an updated version of this preprint - Scaling laws for nonlinear dynamical models of articulatory control - including some theoretical implications of the new model!

arxiv.org/abs/2411.12720

Congratulations to @lancslinguistics.bsky.social @phoneticslab.bsky.social student Emily Gorman who passed her viva today!

Very proud of my PhD student Emily Gorman for passing her viva today - she wrote a great thesis on “Spatial and temporal variation in speech planning”.

Many thanks to the examiners Marianne Pouplier and Danielle Turton for an interesting and rigorous examination.

Congratulations Emily!

A selfie of Simona and Claire together. We are in front the of large Lancaster University logo sign on a yellow brick wall.

A selfie of 11 people around a table at our Christmas dinner. Claire is taking the picture and is in the foreground. Background shows Simona and members of Lancaster Phonetics Lab.

We've been hosting Simona Montanari, California State University, @phoneticslab.bsky.social @lancslinguistics.bsky.social for the past couple of days. Great to hear about Simona's research on Spanish-English bilingual pre-schoolers and celebrate at our lab Christmas party!