Workshops

(1) The phonetics of talk in interaction

Richard Ogden (University of York), Marina Cantarutti (Open University)

The workshop will be an introduction for phoneticians to some of the basics of conversation analysis. The main topic will be turn-taking, but we will also touch on other topics like self-repair and sequential organisation. The workshop will primarily be hands-on: there will be a short overview of some of the issues and methods, followed by an extended data session where we work intensively on a stretch of conversation, aiming to understand its organisation in terms of its phonetic and prosodic design, and how these relate to other orders of organisation, such as turn construction, sequential organisation, and the linguistic (including lexical and syntactic) implementation of social action. One of the things we'll highlight is the orderliness of everyday talk. We will primarily use audio data from British English. There will be a bit of reading to do before the workshop.

Monday 4th April - afternoon

(2) Voice quality synthesis with the UCLA Voice Synthesizer and KlattGrid

Joe Pearce (University of Glasgow)

Laryngeal components of voice quality, called phonation, can form linguistic contrasts as well as serve as cues to the identity, stance, or emotional state of the speaker. Investigating the various functions of voice quality often requires looking at how listeners perceive voice quality, but doing so requires the ability to create stimuli for a perception experiment with controlled differences in voice quality.

This workshop will explore how to take a voice and re-synthesize it with differences in voice quality using two pieces of software: the Praat implementation of the Klatt Synthesizer, called KlattGrid, and UCLA’s software for the analysis and synthesis of voice quality. These programs allow the user to take a voice and separate the glottal source from the filter, so that changes can be made to the source and thus to the resulting voice quality.

After looking at why you might want to synthesize voice quality differences and discussing the advantages and drawbacks of different methods of synthesizing voice quality differences, we will demonstrate both pieces of software and guide you through using both KlattGrid and the UCLA Voice Synthesizer for yourself.

Tuesday 5th April - morning

(3) Developing a career involving Phonetics in academia and beyond

Krestina Christensen (University of York), Justin Lo (UCL)

This workshop is aimed primarily at doctoral researchers who wish to learn more about pursuing a career that involves work with Phonetics. A panel composed of senior and early-career experts in academia and industry will share their experience and advice from a variety of perspectives in relation to career development after doctoral studies. We will address a range of issues under the main themes of (1) preparing for the job market, (2) career development and (3) conducting research through a series of panel discussions and Q&A sessions, where participants of the workshop will be invited to pose their questions to the panel.


The panel members for the workshop will be:

- Jane Stuart-Smith (University of Glasgow)

- Eleanor Chodroff (University of York)

- Mariam Dar (Apple/Institute for Linguistic Evidence)

- Matthew Moreland (University of East Anglia/Oxford Languages Consultant)


Notes for attendees

- The Q&A part of the workshop will be moderated live on Zoom. Participants are not required to submit questions in advance.

- We anticipate the Q&A portion of the workshop to take up approximately half the time of the workshop in total. While we aim to be flexible, the overall time limit means that, depending on the response, we may not be able to get to everyone's questions.

- We will not be recording any part of the workshop.

Thursday 7th April - afternoon

(4) Introductory Bayesian methods (using brms in R)

Clara Cohen (University of Glasgow), Eleanor Chodroff (University of York), David Howcroft (Heriot-Watt University)

We will provide a conceptual understanding of what Bayesian data analysis can do that frequentism cannot do, and offer some structured toy examples to show how to run a model in brms. A rough estimate of the timeline of events is as follows:

Hour 1: Conceptual Bayes with hand calculation

  • Bayes rule, and why it’s philosophically more aligned with our analyses than frequentism (probability of model given data, rather than data given model). 10 minutes

  • A starting example with coin flips. 20 minutes

  • Exercises on the coin-flip example. 10 minutes

  • A brief introduction to sampling from posterior distributions, when things can’t be solved analytically: 10 minutes.

  • Types of priors: 10 minutes

Hour 2: Experimental Bayes using brms

  • Walk through a simple example (simple regression, one or two parameters), no repeated measures. Introduce the logic of the brms analysis, with the specification of priors and the specification of the model. 15-20 minutes

  • Walk through the output of the model and how to interpret it. 10-15 minutes

  • Participants work through their own scaffolded exercise(s): 25 minutes

Friday 8th April - morning