CeTasSSD data entry into Phon

Felicity Laurence and Emma Scanlon are working on entering all of the 2026 data from just over 900 students into Phon. We appreciate the input from Prof Yvan Rose to tweak some of the program for our Australian context.

 

Launch of Phon 4

Congratulations to Yvan Rose and Greg Hedlund and team who launched Phon 4 today (their Thursday 16th April - our Friday 17th April).

https://www.phon.ca/phon-manual/getting_started.html 

Our CeTasSSD team were very honoured to work with Yvan to install and begin using Phon 4 on its first day of release. Yvan has been very generous preparing our speech sample and teaching us how to use it effectively to analyse the data we have collected from our Tasmanian Speech Census.

Helen, Sharynne, Emma, Felicity, Yvan, Ally - meeting #2

Yvan, Emma, Helen, Felicity, Sharynne  - meeting #1

Sarah M's Endeavour Postdoctoral Scholarship in Newfoundland, Canada

Sarah Masso is currently in Newfoundland, Canada on her Endeavour Postdoctoral Scholarship. She is working with A/Prof Yvan Rose at Memorial University of Newfoundland for 4 months. Her project is titled: Developing innovative technology for speech pathologists. Here are her aims:

This Endeavour postdoctoral program will make the comprehensive analysis software (Phon) available for speech pathologists to save them time, money, and resources. A user-friendly interface for Phon will reduce technology barriers hindering speech pathologists’ engagement with this technology. The two key aims for this research are to work with Associate Professor Yvan Rose (linguist and Phon author) to: (1) design an interface for Phon appropriate for speech pathologists internationally, (2) incorporate clinically-useful features, including the Word-level Analysis of Polysyllables (Masso, 2016), within Phon.

Sarah's first day

Sarah picked local blueberries

Jellybean houses

Endeavour Research Fellowship awarded to Sarah M

Congratulations to Sarah Masso who has been awarded an Endeavour Research Fellowship for 2017. The list of 2017 award winners is here.
Sarah will be going  to Memorial University of Newfoundland,  Canada to work with Associate Professor Yvan Rose and Dr Greg Hedlund and the team to help them build a user-friendly interface for Phon. Sarah met with Yvan and Greg in Canada a few months ago at the ICPLA conference (here).

Phon is an innovative and comprehensive open-source analysis software that has been developed for linguists and is free (Rose et al., 2006). Phon has received funding from a number of sources including R01 funding from the US National Institutes of Health (NIH). Phon is currently used in phonetics and speech pathology research and has nine language dictionaries (Rose & Stoel-Gammon, 2015).

Sarah is the third of my students to be awarded an Endeavour Scholarship/Fellowship (see blog posts here). Suzanne Hopf is currently on an Endeavour Postgraduate Scholarship in Fiji. Sarah Verdon was also awarded an Endeavour Research Fellowship after her PhD, but had to decline the offer. The opportunities provided by the Endeavour Scholarships and Fellowships are outstanding, enabling international collaborations that can make a big difference to professional practice and children's lives.

Phon: Workshops and meetings

As part of the International Clinical Phonetics and Linguistics Association conference, Yvan Rose ran two workshops on Phon, an extensive computerized speech analysis tool. Sarah Masso and I attended the workshops, and also were able to meet with Yvan and Greg Hedlund about future planning for Phon to make this comprehensive program more accessible for speech-language pathologists. See earlier posts about Phon here.

Sarah Masso, Greg Hedlund and Yvan Rose

A/Prof Yvan Rose presenting the Phon workshop

Combining PROPH+ and PHON

Sarah Masso and I have been collaborating with Yvan Rose and Brian MacWhinney to to create a computerized speech analysis system that is useful for speech pathologists by combining the features of PROPH+ with PHON. We used the time at ASHA to advance the project further.

Sharynne with Brian MacWhinney

Collaboration, networking, and making friends in Sweden

There is a lot that can be accomplished via emails; however, travel to conferences to meet face-to-face with researchers from across the world provides opportunities for collaboration, networking, and making friends that cannot be achieved virtually. The ICPLA conference hosted delegates from 33 different countries. Here are a few of the people that my students and I met with while in Sweden:

Professor Edy Strandy (Mayo Clinic, US) and Sharynne

Professor May Bernhardt (UBC, Canada) and Suzanne Hopf

Dr Yvan Rose (Canada) and Sarah Masso

Professor Merle Mahon (UCL, UK) and Sharynne

Phon: Computer software for analyzing children's speech

Today at the University of British Columbia, Yvan Rose presented an overview of Phon, (https://www.phon.ca/) computer software for analyzing children's speech. Children's speech corpora can be transcribed using International Phonetic Alphabet symbols and linked to audio or video data. The resulting transcription can be analyzed and searched. Phon is being used by speech researchers around the world and Yvan supported attendees at the Knowledge Mobilization seminar at UBC to ensure that it was running optimally on their computers.

Phon works in association with the CHILDES database, so that children's speech samples can be uploaded and shared throughout the world (http://childes.psy.cmu.edu/phon/).

Future versions of Phon will include acoustic analysis via Praat within the Phon program.

Yvan Rose presenting a paper on Phon and PhonBank