Speech Lunch

 The Phonetics laboratory organizes biweekly "Speech lunches" held in odd weeks during term time. The aim is to bring together Oxford researchers working on any aspects of speech, from acoustics and signal processing to physiology and neuroscience. It is an opportunity for exchange of ideas and expertise between members of different departments and to report on work in progress.

Everyone whose work is related to speech is warmly invited!

For further information and to be added to the maillist, please e-mail May Chan.

The lunches are co-organised by Anastassia Loukina, Zeynab Raeesy, Daniel Smith, and May Chan, and supported by John Coleman, the Phonetics Laboratory.

Trinity term 2012

Week 3, 11 May
'Oiwi Parker-Jones (Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging), Neural Models of Speech.

Week 5, 25 May
Peter Lawlor (Founder of "The Invisible College" audio learning production company), Creating emphasis in speech: insights from the recording industry.

Past talks

Michaelmas term 2010: Animal vocalizations and human speech.

Week 3, 29 October
John Coleman, Review/discussion of 2 papers by Bruce Richman on vocal abilities of gelada monkeys. Download the slides.

Bruce Richman (1976) Some vocal distinctive features used by gelada monkeys. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 60 (3), 718-724.
Bruce Richman (1987) Rhythm and Melody in Gelada Vocal Exchanges. Primates 28(2), 199-223.

Week 5, 12 November,
Kerry Walker, Commonalities between ferret vocalizations and human speech.

Week 7, 26 November
Moira Yip, The search for phonology in birdsong.

Hilary term 2011:

Week 1, 4 February
Steven Chance, Words on the brain: the brain architecture of the lateralisation of speech and writing.

Trinity term 2011: Brain and Language.

Week 1, 6 May
Steven Chance, Introductory neuroanatomy for the naive.

Week 3, 20 May
Richard Rosch, Which side is which? Laterality and language. (see the slides on prezi.com)

Week 5, 3 June
John Stein, The neural basis of phonological deficits in dyslexia. (Slides in .pdf)

Week 7, 17 June
Kate Watkins, Brain imaging studies in developmental disorders of speech and language.

Week 9, 1 July
Nicola Bessell (University College Cork), What does DIVA (a neurocomputational model of speech production) have to say about FAS (Foreign Accent Syndrome)? (Slides in .pdf)

Michaelmas term 2011: Computational Aspects of Speech

Week 1, 14 October
Daniel Hirst, Analysis by synthesis of speech prosody. (Slides in .pdf)

Week 3, 28 October
Jamie Frost, Semantic parsing of natural language input for discourse systems. (Slides in .pdf)

Week 5, 11 November
Sergio Grau, Automatic Speech Understanding: an overview of machine learning techniques used to translate speech into meaning.

Week 7, 25 November
Stephen Pulman, Making distributional models of semantics compositional. (Slides in .pdf)

Hilary term 2012

Week 1, 20 January
Ron Nudel (University of Oxford), Studying the molecular basis of speech and language Disorders. (Further reading in .pdf)

Week 3, 3 February
Tomasz Ciszewski (University of Gdansk), Is metrical foot a phonetic object? (Abstract in .doc)

Week 5, 17 February
John Aston (University of Warwick), Investigating some Chinese dialects using functional data analysis.(Slides in .pdf)

Week 7, 2 March
John Coleman (University of Oxford), Using neologisms to test theories of speech production.

Week 9, 16 March
Daniel Smith (University of Oxford), The perception of acoustic detail in phonation.