Speech research tools
About
We are interested in the development, implementation, and improvement of tools for measuring speech in both research and clinical contexts. Some tools Thea has been involved in either developing and/or testing include:
AutoVOT: a software package for automatic measurement of voice onset time, an acoustic marker of plosive production (like in the sounds “p” and “b”). Thea maintains the readme and has implemented extensions to the Praat plugin.
Automatic forced aligners: Some of our work investigates the efficacy of automatic forced alignment for the automatic detection of speech boundaries. Such tools are widely used on typical speech, but are more error prone on more variable speech such as that of young children and/or people with speech disorders.
Praat scripts: Thea enjoys writing and sharing scripts for use in Praat, the gold standard acoustic analysis program for speech research. She has also given several tutorials on Praat scripting, such as this one.
R and RMarkdown: Thea also enjoys using the R environment for statistics, data visualization, writing, and just about anything else. She’s developed two classes on using R for communication sciences & disorders research and has led several tutorials, such as this one on using R and the R package bookdown to write a dissertation.
For more, see our Resources and Coding Groups pages.