Humans Who Read Grammars

Hello everyone, Hedvig here. I'm currently writing up my PhD thesis, hence the lack of writing here. Hopefully I'll be able to pick it up after submission, there's a lot of drafts lying on blogger waiting for completion. If you really, really miss me in particular, you could listen to my ramble at Talk the Talk - a weekly show about linguistics. Now that the shameless plug and excuses are done with, let's get down and talk about: THE TRANSCRIPTION CHALLENGE! In this blog post, I will focus on a part of this challenge¹ - the workflow for segmenting and transcribing  audio material. This is a rough guide, if it turns out people appreciate something like this I'll re-write it more thoroughly. This is a bit sloppily written in places, but trust me - if I do this "properly" right now I will lose days of work time that I should be spending on my thesis... so, I'll only do it if people really want it - and I might wait a while until I do. Sor...

Hedvig in her office in Canberra figuring this out and writing this guide. Here is another guide for how to do something practical in ELAN. Previously, we relayed Eri Kashima's guide for sensible auto-segmentation with PRAAT and ELAN (time saver!). (For all posts about fieldwork on this blog, see this tag. ) This time: how to take your search results and make the matching annotations into new separate tier(s). This is useful if you for example want to cycle through only the annotations that match a certain search query in transcription mode. This post has a longer guide, and a short guide at the end. You can also use this guide if you want to compare several different transcriptions with each other, for example older and newer versions or if you are collaborating with different people. In that case, start from step (4). For those who don't do a lot of transcription : ELAN ( E UDICO  L inguistic  An notator) is a program from TLA at MPI-Nijmegen. This program allow...

A typical recording situation from my own fieldwork.  Melenesa (my research assistant) and Ta'alolo (one of my informants) in Neiafu-Tai village on Savai'i, in Samoa. Keeping on the theme of linguistic fieldwork (see Jeremy's previous post about his fieldwork experiences here here and Jesse's post about measuring nasality with earbuds here) , I've also got something for you! Two colleagues of mine in the Wellsprings of Linguistic Diversity project, Eri Kashima and Mark Ellison, have figured out a neat way of saving time on segmenting up sound files for transcription. Linguistic fieldwork is so much more than just the time spent in the field site, when you come home there's a lot of work that needs to be done with annotating your files, segmenting them up and in different other ways preparing them for the analysis you want to do. Yours truly, handling transcription files in ELAN in her office in Coombs, Canberra. One thing that takes a lot of time, a...

***POST-EDIT*** This post has been made into a "page" available at the top menu. Updates will be made there for your convenience. As per a request for a list of free online introductory tutorials and manuals for several linguistic oriented software programs, I here by present, from the frozen depths of Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Canada, a list of free introductory tutorials and manuals for Praat, ELAN, R, and a bit on FLEx. I haven’t read them all, but I’ve found some to be very useful over the years. I’ve also shamelessly plugged a few of my own. Please feel free to add to/ remove and/ or modify the listings! Praat Homepage Using Praat for linguistic research – good tutorial by Will Styler Praat short tutorial by: Pascal van Lieshout Yes, that's a mouth and an ear The official massive Praat manual Links to other manuals Tutorial for self study: Basics of phonetics and how to use Praat Hands-on tutorial: Using Praat for analysing a speech corp...