Pronunciation Research Accelerator

The Initiative

Our goal is to foster big-team, collaborative speech science into key topics that represent our shared applied interests and have the potential to bridge the research-practice (or research-policy) divide.

Our Team

Our research team is an international network of speech scholars at all stages of their careers who represent diverse geographies, institutions, and areas of expertise within applied speech science. [read more]

Our Philosophy

We are a team that values multi-lab collaborative work with colleagues around the globe. In our work, we engage in open science practices and support transparent, replicable research.

Projects

Optimizing Perception Learning (OPL)

A multi-site, large-scale data collection and analysis project harnessing the potential of high variability for efficient teaching and learning of second language pronunciation. The project's goals are:

Make sites comparable by fixing perception training features
Make perception training generalizable by allowing sampling characteristics and target structures to vary
Create room for individualization outside of the “core” by allowing researchers to add components a la carte at individual sites

Phase 1

Talkers and Acoustic Analysis

The goal of Phase 1 is to create and describe a large-scale, multi-talker database of speech stimuli to be used in future high-variability training studies (i.e., in Phase 2). The database is envisaged as an open-source repository of various sets of training materials accompanied by detailed specifications of the variability within each set along relevant acoustic/phonetic dimensions.