Documentation

Welcome to the documentation homepage for the Archive of Pittsburgh Language and Speech (aka APLS, pronounced like apples)! APLS is a linguistic data resource, powered by the open-source linguistic corpus software LaBB-CAT, that contains:

• recordings of interviews conducted with speakers native to Pittsburgh and surrounding neighborhoods,
• annotations of linguistic information at the level of phrases, words, and individual speech sounds, allowing us to treat these recordings as structured linguistic data, and
• metadata on interviewees and transcripts that facilitate large-scale (socio)linguistic analysis.

APLS is (and will always be) free to use. APLS is currently under construction, but when complete, it will contain 270 sound files totaling 45 hours of audio from 40 speakers.

Demo: Measuring F1 and F2 for /aw/ in closed syllables

Some speakers of Pittsburgh English use a monophthongal variant of the /aw/ phoneme. This variant, stereotyped as “dahntahn” for downtown, holds important social meanings in Pittsburgh (e.g., Johnstone et al. 2006). A pretty typical data task would be to identify all tokens matching a specific linguistic context (say, /aw/ in closed syllables) and extract a set of acoustic measurements (say, F1 and F2 at 3 timepoints). Normally, performing this sort of batch acoustic measurement on a dataset this big would take hours of manual effort, even if you use state-of-the-art speech technologies for automatic speech recognition and segmental alignment.

With APLS, it takes as little as 2 minutes to measure all 4420 tokens of /aw/ in closed syllables in the corpus.

Show me how!

1. Search for tokens
   • Using regular expressions to search across multiple annotation layers, we find 4420 time-aligned /aw/ tokens
2. Extract search results to a CSV file
   • We get a search-results file with one token per row, and columns for different annotation layers
3. Upload search results to APLS’s built-in Praat module
   • Our search-results file gets updated with acoustic measurements that we specify (in this case, F1 and F2 at the vowel’s 20%, 50%, and 80% timepoints)

Ready to get started with APLS? Click here