Language variation and change
Speaker: Morgan Sonderegger (McGill University)
Title: The SPADE project: large-scale analysis of a spoken language across space and time
Abstract: Speech corpora of many languages, styles, and formats exist in the world, representing significant potential for scientific studies. However in practice there are significant practical and methodological barriers to conducting the “same study” across corpora. The Speech Across Dialects of English (SPADE) project (2017-20), a collaboration between universities in Scotland, Canada and the US, aims to develop and apply user-friendly software for large-scale speech analysis of existing public and private English speech datasets, and to understand how English speech has changed over time and space. This talk summarizes the project's results thus far. We briefly introduce our open-source software system for Integrated Speech Corpus ANalysis (ISCAN), then turn to datasets collected for the project and case studies carried out so far on realization of sibilants and vowels across Old World (British Isles) and New World (North American) English, which illustrate the possibilities of large-scale studies: shedding light on longstanding questions, and enabling new directions.
Contact details
Language variation and change
Room 1.17, Dugald Stewart Building, 3 Charles Street, Edinburgh, EH8 9AD