Asst. Teaching Professor of Linguistics at UC San Diego
Director of UCSD's Computational Social Science Program
Links
Projects and Publications - Collaborators – Linguistics and Language Links - General Linguistics - Phonetics - IPA - Phonology - Acoustics - Computational Linguistics - Statistics - Syntax - Language Fun
Personal Links
Projects and Publications:
Using Praat for Linguistic Research
- A practical guidebook and information package designed to help you use the Praat phonetics software package more effectively in Phonetic or Phonological research. Contains information presented at the 2011 Linguistic Institute’s Praat Workshop.
Will’s writing on language, technology, and more
- I used to run a language blog. I don’t really have time to run it anymore. But I’ve saved the best of the posts above.
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- A rather large subset of the Enron Email corpus designed to be easily accessible to linguists using unix-based tools. 13,000,000+ words at your beck and call.
The Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Vowels
- A (tongue-in-cheek) website, designed to raise awareness of the plight (and true nature) of vowels.
The Online Companion to my previous Poster Presentations
- Supplemental Information and PDFs.
Speech is an Elaborate Cover for Widespread Telepathy - Will Styler
- A satirical paper in which I attempt to do away with the silly and improbable “speech” theory of language, and replace it with a far simpler option: a species-wide telepathic link.
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- A list of my publications, listing citations as well.
Will Styler’s Praat Script Page
- This has all of the scripts I distributed with the Praat workshop, and more. Great for cannibalizing code, and learning all the silly things I’ve done in writing my own scripts.
Collaborators, Colleagues, and Affiliated Institutions:
University of California San Diego Linguistics Department
- My home department, and the people most often subjected to my linguistics nerdiness.
University of Michigan Linguistics Department
- My home during my Post Doctoral Fellowships
The University of Colorado Phonetics Lab
- The Phonetics lab where I grew up, so to speak.
Phonetics:
The UCLA Phonetics Lab Teaching Materials Homepage
- Lots of good information and sound files for IPA charts.
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- Want sound files for various languages? UCLA can help!
Using Praat for Linguistic Research
- My tutorial for using Praat to accomplish all sorts of phonetic tasks, complete with pages of explanation of why Praat does some of the funny things it does.
Will Styler’s Praat Script Page
- A bunch of Praat scripts that I wrote or modified which you might find useful.
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- This is a great resource when learning the IPA, to help you visualize just what’s going on in the mouth and throat.
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- Recorded in 1962, an X-Ray film of Ken Stevens speaking.
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- MRI video of an operatic singer and a hiphop emcee singing and beatboxing. Wonderful, and longer than the clips above
Jennifer Smith’s Online Phonetic Resources site
- Another great list of phonetics and phonology resources, with many more than I have here.
Smalley’s Manual of Articulatory Phonetics (interactive site)
- The best way to learn Non-English pronunciation, complete with sound files, exercises, and more!
Anatomical Tutorial During Trans-nasal Endoscopy
- A great (and somewhat graphic) video of the vocal folds in use, both with normal lighting and stroboscopy.
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- Four singers performing with endoscopes inserted, showing, the vocal folds as they sing, cleverly edited. Non-stroboscopic.
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- Modeling the vocal tract during vowel production using a variety of physical reconstructions. With video and audio.
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- This creepy little thing is capable of modeling vowels in a flexible vocal tract by moving a series of mechanical actuators, and even has nasality. Watch for the little flappy velum lever in the back.
A Phonetician’s Software Toolkit
- This is a blog-post I made some time back, discussing the tools I use(d) for different purposes in phonetic analysis as of 2015.
The International Phonetic Alphabet:
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- Yet another IPA chart site. Also awesome, also sonically enabled.
Jonathan Dowse’s Clickable IPA Chart
- Another great IPA learning resource.
Unicode Entity Codes for IPA Symbols
- Ever needed Unicode entity codes for IPA symbols? Well, here you go.
Using IPA Fonts with OS X: The Comprehensive Guide
- Are you on a Mac? Do you use the IPA? This is an up-to-date guide on how to unite the two in holy fontrimony.
i2speak Free Online IPA Keyboard
- This is a really great resource for if you need to type out IPA, but don’t have a keyboard layout installed on your current machine.
Phonology:
A Phonological Atlas of North America
- Great information about regional accents in American English.
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- A quick and easy interface to the UCLA Phonological Segment Inventory Database.
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- A wonderful resource for those interested in foreign and regional accents in English.
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- “How English sounds to speakers of other languages”. Along these same veins, Prisencolinensinainciusol.
Acoustics:
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- A tool to generate a real-time FFT spectral slice and waveform, plus the ability to “waterfall” the FFTs, showing a sort of 3D Spectrogram. Mac Installation Instructions
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- This is a wonderful way to visualize sound.
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- A good introduction to room acoustics and the sorts of things you might have to do to make your lab or recording area sound better.
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- A tool to calculate the room mode for any given space. Very nicely done.
Acoustics and Vibration Animations
- Great animations for teaching (and learning) acoustics.
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- The best tutorial on positioning loudspeakers in a room (for music) that I’ve found.
United States Navy Electricity and Electronics Training Series - NEETS
- Not acoustics, strictly speaking, but this is a full course on working with electricity which covers ideas like vacuum tubes, amplifiers, wave generation, and other topics which are useful to have some exposure to.
Computational and Corpus Linguistics:
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- Search word frequencies in every book in the Google Books Corpus, viewing frequencies over time as well as comparing the distributions of different words over time. Try “war”, “hippies”, and “inflammable vs. flammable”.
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- See which search terms correlate (temporally) with which other terms.
Additional Computational and Corpus Linguistics Bookmarks
- Some additional Computational and Corpus Linguistics bookmarks from the author.
Syntax:
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- The best means I’ve found for drawing syntax trees (well, without using LaTeX)
Fun with Language:
1st International Collection of Tongue Twisters
- A Massive collection of Tongue Twisters, great for phonetic analysis and confusion.
NPR’s Car Talk Staff Credits Listing
- Every week, they end the show with a series of bad puns (“Our asphalt contractor is Luciano Pavearoadi…”). This is a listing of all of them, magnificent for use in terrible pun transcription assignments.
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- This is a program, designed for playing tabletop RPGs, that runs a given text through an automated translation API X number of times given a dice roll, thus turning otherwise understandable words into gibberish.
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- A term that far more people need to know about.
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- A song which sounds like it’s entirely and convincingly in English, except for the little fact that it’s all gibberish.
Learn Lakota with the Lakota Berenstain Bears
- This is just wonderful.
Mew - Nervous Terrain ForwardsBackwards
- A song written and processed to have understandable and interpretable lyrics played both forwards and backwards. Impressive!
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- Converts English text (or whole websites) into “Redneck, Jive, Cockney, Elmer Fudd, Swedish Chef, Moron, Pig Latin, or Hacker.” A minute or two of laughs, and a few hours of discussion as to the sociolinguistics of the choices made in “translation”.