Speech and Language Laboratory

Welcome to the Speech and Language Laboratory at the Australian National University.

The Speech and Language Lab is a joint initiative between the School of Literature, Languages and Linguistics (College of Arts & Social Sciences) and the School of Culture, History and Language (College of Asia & the Pacific). The lab is a cross-linguistic research group, specifically interested in Australian Languages, Forensics, Phonetics and Phonology, Second Language Acquisition, and Sociolinguistics. The lab provides research opportunities to both undergraduate and post-graduate students. It comprises a recording studio, perception lab, and common room. The available equipment includes: audio- and video-recorders, microphones, headphones, laptops, experiment presentation software (E-prime), and an ultrasound.

Phonetics and phonology

Dr Ksenia Gnevsheva, Co-director, stream leader

This stream focuses on human speech communication: how sounds are produced from the acoustic and articulatory perspectives and how they are perceived by listeners in languages worldwide. Some of the projects in this stream investigate how Australian English pronunciation varies across social groups, how bilinguals’ first language affects their accent in the second language and vice versa, how sound systems vary across languages, and what factors contribute to speech perception.

Forensics

Associate Professor Shunichi Ishihara, Co-director, stream leader

The forensics stream concerns linguistic material as forensic-scientific evidence, for example, to assist the court to solve legal cases or in police investigation. It requires multi-disciplinary skills and knowledge including linguistics, speech/text processing, statistics, law and computing. In particular, the team is interested in forensic voice/text comparison, and its related areas. It is a rapidly growing area due to increasing malicious cyber activities and the fear of terrorism, which are all considered to be key national security risks.

Australian Languages

Dr Carmel O'Shannessy, Stream leader

As part of ANU’s commitment to engagement with Australian Indigenous peoples, this stream aims to increase our understandings of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander languages and cultures. We document some of the many traditional, and newer, ways of speaking, and draw on rich corpora. By analysing interactions of linguistic and social structures, we increase our understandings of the richness and complexity of language structure and human interaction.

Second Language Acquisition

Dr Solene Inceoglu, Stream leader

The Second Language Acquisition stream focuses on how additional languages are learned and taught. This is an interdisciplinary field with close relationships with other areas of study such as (psycho-) linguistics, education, sociolinguistics, and conversation analysis. Some of the projects in this stream investigate how to train learners to perceive and produce sounds in a second language, how to teach foreign languages, and what cognitive factors and individual differences influence second language acquisition.

Sociolinguistics

Professor Catherine Travis, Stream leader

Sociolinguistics is the study of language in its social context — how the way people speak is influenced by social background (e.g., age, gender, class, ethnicity), how ways of speaking can be used to project different identities, and how different ways of speaking are perceived and interpreted. In the Sociolinguistics stream of the lab, we tackle these questions (as they apply in Australia and beyond) through studying corpora of spontaneous speech, and in experimental and survey work.