*** Apologies for cross-posting***

Dear all, 

Santiago Barreda from UC Davis (https://linguistics.ucdavis.edu/people/santiago-barreda) will be visiting the Department of Swedish Language and Multilingualism from May 26-29. As part of his visit, we are pleased to invite you to a half-day workshop on Tuesday, May 27, featuring a research talk and a hands-on tutorial on formant tracking, please see schedule below.

Date: Tuesday, May 27

Location: room D365, Södra Huset D, Frescati

13.30-14.30

Tutorial: The ‘problem’ of formant tracking, and how to use fast track.

An overview of key challenges in formant tracking will be presented, followed by an introduction to the Fast Track tool (https://github.com/santiagobarreda/FastTrack). The session includes basic theory, practical examples, and hands-on time for trying out the tool and asking questions.

15.00-16.30

Talk: A Bayesian Model of Joint Vowel and Speaker Perception.

Researchers often employ normalization algorithms to transform formant representations of vowels into more neatly invariant phonetic representations. Although these models are meant to reflect the perceptual transformations carried out by human listeners, they usually rely on parameters estimated 'offline' using substantial information about the speaker. This makes them fundamentally different from speech perception in which listeners must 'guess' the necessary speaker parameters at the same time as they 'guess' the linguistic content in the signal. I will present a Bayesian model of vowel normalization that simultaneously estimates speaker characteristics and vowel quality/category from individual vowels/syllables. By integrating speech perception and the perception of speaker characteristics from limited evidence, this model offers a better approximation of human speech perception than 'traditional' approaches to normalization. A paper providing more detail is available here: https://github.com/santiagobarreda/STM_paper And an R package that can be used to simulate perceptual data is available here: https://github.com/santiagobarreda/STM

If you are interested in attending, please let me know whether you plan to join for one or both sessions. Feel free to forward this information to anyone who might be interested.

Welcome!

Anna

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Anna Persson, FD / PhD
Lecturer

Department of Swedish Language and Multilingualism
Stockholm University
SE-106 91 Stockholm, Sweden
Email: anna.persson@su.se

My profile page: Anna Persson
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