USC Phonetics and Phonology Group

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What does the USC Phonetics & Phonology Group do?

We study how the sound patterns of languages shape the form of words and phrases (phonology), and

What the articulatory, acoustic, and perceptual characteristics of those sounds are and how they are produced and processed (phonetics).

Recent & Past News

Congratulations to Louis Goldstein for being made Fellow of the Linguistic Society of America.

USC Linguistics welcomes Assistant Professors Karen Jesney and Khalil Iskarous!

Congratulations to post-doc Sam Tilsen on his appointment as Assistant Professor at Cornell.

Professor Dani Byrd has been appointed Vice Dean for Faculty in USC Dornsife.

The undergraduate textbook Discovering Speech, Words, and Mind by Dani Byrd and Toby Mintz has been published by Wiley-Blackwell and is intended for use in undergraduate courses such as Language and Mind and introductions to psycholinguistics and cognitive speech science.

Congratulations to Ben Parrell for winning the Best Student Paper Award at the 2010 Speech Prosody V Conference for Parrell, Lee & Byrd, "Evaluation of Juncture Strength using Articulatory
Synthesis of Prosodic Gestures and Functional Data Analysis."

Congratulations to our three (!) phonetics lab members who were accepted for oral presentations at LabPhon 12:  Ben Parrell, Mike Proctor, and Sam Tilsen.

Congratulations to Michal Temkin Martinez on her appointment as Assistant Professor at Boise State University.

The USC Phonetics and Phonology group  is delighted to congratulate Professor Dani Byrd
on her appointment as Vice Dean for Faculty and Research of USC College.  --SN

The USC Phonetics Laboratory and the USC Department of Linguistics welcomes Professor Louis Goldstein as the newest member of our faculty! (2007)

We congratulate Professor Shri Narayanan of the USC Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical Engineering (and the Dept. of Linguistics!) on his appointment as the first holder of the Viterbi Professorship in Engineering. The Dean's announcement can be found here.

Congratulations to Jelena Krivokapic on her appointment as Assistant Professor in the Department of Linguistics at Yale University.

Congratulations to Rebeka Campos-Astorkiza on her appointment as Assistant Professor at The Ohio State University.

Professor Dani Byrd (PI) with Professors Shri Narayanan and Sungbok Lee was awarded an R-01 from the National Institutes of Health NIDCD for $2,844,550 (total costs) titled Prosody and Articulatory Dynamics in Spoken Language. (September 2006 - August 2010).

We are all so saddened to learn of the death of Professor Peter Ladefoged, Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Phonetics at UCLA and Adjunct Professor at USC, on January 24th in London.  Our hearts are with Jenny and their children. A rememberance website is here, and the family asks that donations, in lieu of flowers, be made to the Endangered Language Fund.

Congratulations to Professor Shri Narayanan and his colleague Prof. Alex Potamianos (Technical University of Crete) who have been awarded a 2005 Best Paper Award from the IEEE Signal Processing Society for their paper "Creating conversational interfaces for children."

Introducing the USC Speech Production and Articulation kNowledge Group (SPAN) including
The Real-time MRI Video Phonetics Sounds Tutorial

The Phonetics Laboratory and the SAIL Laboratory are pleased to host the Happy Birthday, Peter Ladefoged website in honor of Professor Ladefoged's 80th birthday.

Professor Shri Narayanan of EE-Systems and Linguistics has been elected Fellow of The Acoustical Society of America, effective November 1, 2005, "for contributions in speech production and imaging." 

The USC Chronicle (7/7/05) features Professor Shri Narayanan's machine speech translation project--Transonics.

Congratulations to Jelena Krivokapic for receiving the Acoustical Society of America's 2005 Stetson Scholarship!

We are thrilled to announce that Professor Peter Ladefoged is now an Adjunct Professor at USC.

Professor Shri Narayanan gave the "Hot Topics" talk at the Vancouver meeting of the Acoustical Society of America (May 2005).

We are pleased to announce that the National Institutes of Health NIDCD has awarded Shri Narayanan (PI) (EE, Ling, CS), Dani Byrd (Co-lead Investigator) (Ling), Krishna Nayak (EE), Sungbok Lee (Ling & EE), and Richard Leahy (EE) an award of $1,767,992 (May 2005-April 2009) for their research project entitled “Dynamics of Vocal Tract Shaping.”  This is a brand new grant taking advantage of the real-time MRI technique recently developed by the group.

We are pleased to announce that the Office of Naval Research has awarded its 5-year 5 million dollar Multidisciplinary University Research Initiative (MURI) grant to a collaboration among USC (Shri Narayanan [EE] & Dani Byrd [LAS]), Stanford, and University of Washington (J. Blimes, PI) for a project entitled Human-like Speech Processing, in response to its call for “radically new approaches to speech-to-text conversion.”  This was the only award made for this announced MURI topic.

Daylen Riggs and Jason Adams received an Honorable Mention in the USC Undergraduate Research Symposium for their poster on “Interacting effects of syllable and phrase position on consonant articulation.”

Jerry Liu was awarded second prize in the Best Student Paper Competition at the San Diego Meeting of the Acoustical Society of America for his paper entitled "Nasalization, neutralization, and merger in English front vowels."

At the 75th Anniversary Meeting of the Acoustical Society, Dani Byrd was invited to speak at a special session on the Future of Acoustics.  Her talk on the Future Challenges in Speech Communication Research is available here.

In the news--emotion research at Professor Narayanan’s Speech Analysis and Interpretation Lab!  A case study on automated call centers has attracted national and international media attention recently! (C. M. Lee & Narayanan, IEEE Transactions on Speech and Audio Processing, in press.)  In February, Professor Narayanan was interviewed about his system on:  MSNBC--Countdown with Keith Olberman, MIT Technology Review, wired.com, Canadian Broadcast Corporation (locally on KPCC, Pasadena), Scotland Sunday Herald, Germany’s Focus magazine, Inc. Magazine, and Inside Edition.

On November 14th, USC hosted a phonology workshop "Where are we going? Phonology at the edge."

Professor Shri Narayanan (USC EE--Systems, IMSC, & Linguistics) has been appointed a Faculty Fellow for the Provost's Center for Interdisciplinary Research for 2003-2004.

Professor Shri Narayanan has won an Early Career Award from the National Science Foundation [USC News, IMSC News, July 10, 2003].

Professor Dani Byrd was awarded the R. Bruce Lindsay Award from the Acoustical Society of America. She is the first winner from the Speech Communication Technical Area in 17 years.

Professor Dani Byrd (with Professors Shri Narayanan, USC EE--Systems & IMSC, and Elliot Saltzman, BU) has been awarded $910,000 (total award to USC $1,470,220) over the next 4 years from NIH in ongoing support of research on Prosody and Articulatory Dynamics in Spoken Language.

Professor Narayanan has won the Electrical Engineering Department's Junior Research Award [article from the Chronicle].