Phonetics Lab

 Phonetics at USC studies the articulatory, acoustic, and perceptual properties of speech sounds from a linguistic perspective, both informing and being informed by an understanding of linguistic representations, structures, and processes found in human language and human cognition. We have a special interest in speech production from a cognitive science perspective, which seeks to illuminate the connections between speech as human action and the percept of those actions. 

Our special areas of research focus on the coordination of speech movements, dynamic imaging of speech production, and understanding and computationally modeling spoken language as a complex dynamical system. We explore how linguistic structure, including particularly prosodic structure, conditions the spatiotemporal realization of articulatory movement during speaking. This research program investigates the control and coordination of articulation and its relation to grammatical structure within a dynamical systems model of speech production. We also investigate the relation between articulation and acoustics, especially how the interaction between the two informs phonological representation. 

The USC Phonetics Laboratory is the home of experimental work in speech science within the USC Linguistics Department. The Laboratory includes a computing/meeting area and a physiology area equipped with dual magnetometers for tracking articulator kinematics. The Laboratory has state-of-the-art acoustic, signal processing, and statistical analysis tools, and collaborates with the USC SAIL Laboratory in the USC Viterbi School of Engineering and with the Dynamic Imaging Science Center (DISC) in the Michelson Center for Convergent Bioscience.  Since the end of the Covid lockdown, articulatory data collection has largely taken place at DISC, which is steps away from the Linguistics Department on the USC main campus.

The USC Phonetics Laboratory is a state-of-the-art facility for acoustic and articulatory speech analysis. 

It includes a computing space and a physiology space, and features the following capabilities:

Magnetometer Articulatory Movement Tracking Systems