Our own Prof Claire Nance of @lancslinguistics.bsky.social was on BBC Breakfast this morning talking about changes to local accents, including here in Lancaster 🗣️💬
Watch the segment now from 1hr 50m, or look out for her on BBC North West Tonight this evening!
I’m hiring an 18-month postdoc to work on physics-informed machine learning for acoustic-articulatory speech inversion at
@phoneticslab.bsky.social
🗓️ Deadline: Friday 10 April.
🔗 More info & applications: hr-jobs.lancs.ac.uk/Vacancy.aspx...
📣 Please share with anyone who might be a good fit!
We’re looking for a new colleague!
theconversation.com/amanda-seyfr...
A really good piece here from Danielle Turton on recreation of historical accents and why the choices of accents and features matter, especially when they're 'regional' rather than RP.
Last week @clrnance.bsky.social was on BBC Radio Lancashire and Radio Cumbria talking about rhoticity and accent change. If you’re in the UK, you can still catch up on the segment!
Link on: phoneticslab.github.io/general/2026...
New @phoneticslab.bsky.social paper from @clrnance.bsky.social!
Very happy to have been awarded an APEX grant for a project on “Interpretable acoustic-articulatory relations in speech production” w/ co-investigators Anton Ragni & Aneta Stefanovska. The plan is to do some interesting speech research at the intersection of linguistics, physics & computer science!
Plotting your spectral slices in R will soon be a lot easier!
Needed to take my daughter into work for a short time today so while there our amazing @phoneticslab.bsky.social let her ultrasound her tongue! She thought it was very, very cool.
We are very excited that Samuel Schmück has been awarded a Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellowship for a great project on speech analytics and under-represented language varieties in speech technology. Many congratulations Sam!
@samschmueck.bsky.social @leverhulme.ac.uk
We're looking forward to INTERSPEECH 2025!! @interspeech.bsky.social #Interspeech2025
And also a paper accepted at CogSci 2025! ✨
➡️ Phonetic accommodation and inhibition in a dynamic neural field model
arxiv.org/abs/2502.01210
Photo of Sam Kirkham giving a talk. He is standing in front of a white wall and pointing towards a slide that shows results on phonetic accommodation.
As part of the #ViTraLiP transnational course, our virtual guest was @samkirkham.bsky.social from Lancaster University. During our exchange in #Paris, we were able to attend his talk at the #SRPP colloquium. Thanks to @lppparis.bsky.social for inviting us! Read more here: tinyurl.com/vitralip.
2. Nosey: Open-source hardware for acoustic nasalance - led by PhD student Maya Dewhurst, with Jack Collins, Roy Alderton & Sam Kirkham
(psst there's 3D printing in there)
We've got 2 papers accepted to #Interspeech2025 (although you'll only see my collaborators and not me at Rotterdam 🥲):
1. Articulatory strategy in vowel production as a basis for speaker discrimination - with Pat Strycharczuk & Sam Kirkham
@phoneticslab.bsky.social
@lancslinguistics.bsky.social
✨Discovering dynamical laws for speech gestures ✨
➡️ I’m delighted to announce my new article out today in Cognitive Science, where I discover simple mathematical laws that govern articulatory control in speech.
🔗 onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10....
@cogscisociety.bsky.social
Hot off the press! My tutorial on ultrasound data collection & analysis is now out. Open Access. Part of a special issue in the Journal of the Phonetic Society of Japan, with lots of other cool studies. Articulatory phonetics is going strong in Japan!
www.jstage.jst.go.jp/article/onse...
We had a great time at Campus in the City last week, where hundreds of people engaged with our activities on beatboxing ultrasound, language escape rooms, gender representation in animated films, Lancashire accent quiz, nasal visualisation, and more!
Sam Kirkham
Discovering dynamical laws for speech gestures
https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.04849
A group of 10 colleagues in a room. Most of us are wearing red Lancaster Phonetics Lab t-shirts. I am holding an ultrasound probe and Sam Kirkham is holding a nasalance device.
We had a brilliant time at Lancaster University's public engagement festival, Campus in the City, yesterday! We engaged with 260 people in Morecambe with ultrasound, nasalance, accent quizzes, gender and language, and a grammar escape room! @lancslinguistics.bsky.social @phoneticslab.bsky.social
I wrote some software that visualises real-time nasalance for our @phoneticslab.bsky.social public engagement event this week!
We use two microphones to capture oral and nasal signals, separated by a baffle, and map each signal's amplitude to a visual representation of the face!
Our new paper on "Dimensionality Reduction in Lingual Articulation of Vowels" is now out in Language & Speech!
How should we quantify tongue shape in vowel production? We evaluate various measures and identify multi-dimensional measures for vowel analysis.
journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...
A photograph showing the book spines for Volumes 1 to 4 of Foundational Papers in Complexity Science.
Spring reading! Looking forward to (slowly) making it through the four volumes of “Foundational papers in complexity science” @sfiscience.bsky.social
Great SRPP (@lppparis.bsky.social) talk on speech modelling by @samkirkham.bsky.social (@phoneticslab.bsky.social) 👅 A very clear overview of why we should care about modelling and the considerations that need to be made when creating new models. 🧠
New open access paper in Speech Communication on “nasal coarticulation in Lombard speech”: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
I argue that, in Lombard speech, coarticulatory vowel nasality falls amid a compressed range of nasalisation, but coarticulation is maintained
@phoneticslab.bsky.social
A selfie of me standing in front of the Jagiellonian University banner. The banner shows a modern university building where I gave my talk. The banner has a blue background showing the university logo. The weather is cold at the moment so I am wearing a black winter coat, purple scarf, and a grey hat.
It was my great privilege to give a talk yesterday at Jagiellonian University in Kraków, hosted by the Language Documentation Centre, Department of General and Indo-European Linguistics.
@lancslinguistics.bsky.social
@phoneticslab.bsky.social
Scaling laws for nonlinear dynamical models of articulatory control
➡️ My new article out today in JASA Express Letters, in which I present some new advances on nonlinear task dynamic models of articulatory speech movements.
🔗 doi.org/10.1121/10.0...
@asa-news.bsky.social
A man is standing on a green grassy mountainside. He is wearing a beige t-shirt, sunglasses, and a rucksack. The sky is blue and the grass is very green.
We are delighted to welcome Dr Anton Malmi, who has started a 3-year postdoc in @phoneticslab.bsky.social @lancslinguistics.bsky.social funded by the Estonian Research Council! Anton will be investigating the acquisition of palatalisation in Estonian children using ultrasound tongue imaging.
