A. Links to Phonetics Resources
Table of Contents
The IPA is grateful to the members of the Education Committee who compiled many of these links and added their comments.
Note:
- The links marked with the symbol ⊗ may not fully work with some browsers, in particular, with Safari (the default bowser for Mac) due to the lack of plugins available compared to Chrome and Firefox. Please try a different browser if you have problems downloading or playing files.
- The IPA does not guarantee the maintenance or validity of these sites, but provides the links as a general service to the Phonetics community.
A.1 Learning the IPA symbols
- Clickable IPA charts with audio and video for two speakers.
- Recorded by two phoneticians (G. Khattab and G. Docherty), University of Newcastle ⊗
https://teaching.ncl.ac.uk/ipa/chart.html - Frontal and saggital videos and animated vocal tracts, University of Sheffield
https://learnipa.group.shef.ac.uk/IPAChart/index.html
- Recorded by two phoneticians (G. Khattab and G. Docherty), University of Newcastle ⊗
- Elementary Ear-training exercises to learn the IPA symbols, University of Sheffield
https://learnipa.group.shef.ac.uk/IPAEarTraining/index.html - Clickable IPA charts with the sounds of the IPA. Click a symbol to hear it pronounced.
- Recorded by John Esling ⊗
https://web.uvic.ca/ling/resources/ipa/charts/IPAlab/IPAlab.htm - Recordings by various phoneticians (J. Esling, J. House, P. Ladefoged, J. Wells) illustrating variation in the pronunciation of phonetic symbols
https://linguistics.ucla.edu/people/keating/IPA/inter_chart_2018/IPA_201... - Peter Isotalo, with clips taken from https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/General_phonetics. Scroll down the page
http://www.ipachart.com/
- Recorded by John Esling ⊗
A.2 IPA symbols, phonetics fonts, and languages illustrated
- Homepage of the International Phonetic Association
https://www.internationalphoneticassociation.org/ - Download a phonetic keyboard to type IPA in Unicode.
- PC users. Install the Unicode Phonetic keyboard (like installing another language) and switch to it when typing long passages in transcription. Then switch back to the regular keyboard.
https://en.freedownloadmanager.org/Windows-PC/Unicode-Phonetic- Keyboard-UCL-FREE.html
https://www.phon.ucl.ac.uk/resource/phonetics/ - Mac Users. You can type the IPA symbols by simply clicking on an on-screen keyboard
https://www.blugs.com/IPAPalette/
- PC users. Install the Unicode Phonetic keyboard (like installing another language) and switch to it when typing long passages in transcription. Then switch back to the regular keyboard.
- Download IPA fonts at
http://software.sil.org/lcgfonts/support/using-sil-web-fonts/
Doulos SIL is a widely used Unicode-based font family https://software.sil.org/doulos/download/ - IPA symbol equivalents. Unicode characters that have equivalent IPA symbols
http://scriptsource.org/cms/scripts/page.php?item_id=entry_detail&uid=wl... - Illustration of how the IPA can be used to transcribe various accents (native and non-native) of English. The Speech Archive at George Mason University
http://accent.gmu.edu/browse.php - List and location of the languages illustrated in the Journal of the International Phonetic Association
https://richardbeare.github.io/marijatabain/ipa_illustrations_all.html
A.3 Pronouncing dictionaries
- Online pronouncing dictionaries using IPA symbols and sound files.
- British and American English:
https://dictionary.cambridge.org/ - British English:
https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/ - CUBE, Geoff Lindsey’s online pronouncing dictionary of current British English. You can search for sounds, word frequency, minimal pairs, stress patterns and syllables counts, amongst others:
https://www.englishspeechservices.com/cube-dictionary - WordReference features transcription and soundfiles for English and French (including the main dialects); transcription only for Portuguese and Italian; and soundfiles only for Spanish and Chinese:
http://www.wordreference.com/
- British and American English:
- Online pronouncing dictionaries with sound files but NOT using IPA symbols for transcription or not providing transcription.
- American English:
http://www.merriam-webster.com/ - Spanish:
https://www.spanishdict.com/ - The Spanish Oxford dictionary offers audio of both Castilian Spanish and Latin American Spanish:
https://es.oxforddictionaries.com/
- American English:
- British English pronunciation. It includes proper names of people and places not included in most dictionaries. Click on the word to hear it pronounced:
http://www.howjsay.com/
A.4 Articulatory phonetics
Vocal-tract diagrams
- Animated vocal-tract anatomy diagrams, audios and videos for English, German and Spanish sounds and words, from the Phonetics Flash Animation Project, University of Iowa
http://soundsofspeech.uiowa.edu/anatomy.html - Interactive cross-section of vocal organs and IPA symbols, by Daniel Hall, University of Toronto
http://smu-facweb.smu.ca/~s0949176/sammy/
http://homes.chass.utoronto.ca/~danhall/phonetics/sammy-old.html - Other online links (Jennifer Smith, University of North Carolina):
https://users.castle.unc.edu/~jlsmith/phonetics-resources.html#(1)
The speaking vocal tract
- High speed X-ray video of Kenneth N. Stevens producing nonce-words and English phrases, from the web site for Ladefoged & Johnson's, A Course in Phonetics
https://corpus.linguistics.berkeley.edu/acip/appendix/vocal_tracts/KNS.html - X-ray videos of tongue, jaw and larynx position during [ i e a o u], from the web site for Peter Ladefoged's Vowels and Consonants
http://www.phonetics.ucla.edu/vowels/chapter11/chapter11.html - Animation from X-ray data of Bulgarian speech illustrating coarticulation effects, by Sidney Wood
http://swphonetics.com/coarticulation/exbulg/ - The x-ray film database by K. Munhall, E. Vatikiotis-Bateson and Y. Tohkura. X-ray films of speakers of Canadian English and French reading sentences, Queen’s University at Kingston
https://www.queensu.ca/psychology/speech-perception-and-production-lab/x... - Animated speech synthesizer by Neil Thapen. You may move different parts of the tongue and velum to generate vowels, consonants and CV syllables
https://dood.al/pinktrombone/ - Real-time MRI videos of several phoneticians producing the sounds of the IPA. Speech Production and Articulation Knowledge Group, University of Southern California
https://sail.usc.edu/span/rtmri_ipa/index.html - MRI, Ultrasound and animation videos of the sounds of the IPA, including a description of how the techniques work. University of Glasgow
https://www.seeingspeech.ac.uk/ - MRI videos of the articulators during connected speech.
- English, from the University of Oxford
http://www.phon.ox.ac.uk/mri - English unscripted speech, from the Speech Production and Articulation Knowledge Group, University of Southern California
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nvvn-ZVdeqQ - Mandarin Chinese, from Dio Brando
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ezOwCf835YA
- English, from the University of Oxford
- Description and data analysis of a variety of techniques to study speech articulation: aerodynamic data, electromyography, and electropalatograpy, from Macquarie University. Follow the link to ‘Speech Physiology’
http://clas.mq.edu.au/speech/physiology/ema/index.html - Tutorials on obtaining and interpreting EPG, EMA, aerodynamic, and EGG data (though they need updating), from the UCLA Phonetics Lab. Follow the ‘Physiology’ link
http://phonetics.linguistics.ucla.edu/facilities/facilities.html - Articulatory demos and illustrations from the UCLA phonetics lab
http://phonetics.linguistics.ucla.edu/demos/demos.html - Demos and research on articulatory models done at Haskins Labs
https://haskinslabs.org/about-us/features-and-demos
The larynx, phonation, and VOT
- The vocal folds in action using stroboscopy. Vowels at different pitch and loudness, University of Washington, Speech and Hearing clinic
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v9Wdf-RwLcs - Vocal fold vibration in normal voice, the Voice and Swallowing Center of Maine
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gv4evDGLgjQ - Endoscopic and stroboscopic views of the larynx with descriptions of what you see, from the Voice Clinic, Nottingham
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cARrJoDDUVY - Informative course on voice production, from the National Center for Voice and Speech
http://www.ncvs.org/ncvs/tutorials/voiceprod/tutorial/index.html - Description and illustration of phonation types, by K. Marasek, Experimental Phonetics Group, University of Stuttgart (see also further aspects of voice quality and EGG by clicking through the other pages at the bottom)
https://www.ims.uni-stuttgart.de/institut/arbeitsgruppen/phonetik/EGG/pa... - EGG analysis and downloadable software, by N. Henrich, C. Gendrot & A. Michaud
http://voiceresearch.free.fr/egg/ - Tutorials on voicing and VOT in plosives, by John Maidment, University College London. Some of the other links are not being maintained
https://www.phon.ucl.ac.uk/resource/tutorials.html - Transcription Practice on Voicing, Aspiration, Implosives, Ejectives. Bruce Hayes, UCLA
http://linguistics.ucla.edu/people/hayes/103/VOTAndAirstreamMechanismPra...
A.5 Speech acoustics
- Tutorial on speech acoustics by Robert Mannell, Felicity Cox and Jonathan Harrington, Macquarie University. It features illustrative spectrograms and sound files of English words under ‘Consonant acoustics’
https://www.mq.edu.au/about/about-the-university/faculties-and-departmen... - Introductory material to speech acoustics by K. Russell, University of Manitoba
http://home.cc.umanitoba.ca/~krussll/phonetics/acoustic/acoustic.html - Introductory notes to acoustics by Timothy Bunnell, University of Delaware. You can click on the waveforms to hear the sound
http://www.asel.udel.edu/speech/tutorials/acoustics/sound.html - Tutorials from The Physics Classroom including animations and interactive exercises, by Tom Henderson.
- Waves
http://www.physicsclassroom.com/Class/waves/ - Sound Waves and Music
http://www.physicsclassroom.com/Class/sound/
- Waves
- Vowel acoustics by Sidney Wood
- Perturbation theory
https://swphonetics.com/articulation/bell-vowel-model/150th-anniversary/... - Interpreting vowel articulation from formant frequencies
https://swphonetics.com/methods/vowel-articulation-from-formants/
- Perturbation theory
- Spectrogram reading
- Introduction to spectrogram reading by Rob Hagiwara, University of Manitoba.
http://home.cc.umanitoba.ca/~robh/howto.html#intro - Practice segmenting spectrograms, with audio files, and detailed discussion of the segmentation and sound features
http://home.cc.umanitoba.ca/~krussll/phonetics/practice/spectrogram-segm...
- Introduction to spectrogram reading by Rob Hagiwara, University of Manitoba.
- Acoustical Standard Terminology Database (searchable), created by the Acoustical Society of America
https://asastandards.org/asa-standard-term-database/?utm_source=ASA&utm_...
A.6 Speech perception
- Introduction to speech perception and interactive speech perception experiments, Rice University. The website is not maintained and the link may fail at times, but it is an informative online multimedia resource
http://psyc-experiments.com/mmtbn/language/sPerception/sPerception.html - Categorical perception experiments and demos.
- Categorical Perception of place of articulation in stops, USC. Includes online demo and interactive results
http://dornsife-blogs.usc.edu/language-and-mind/wp-content/cp_home/ - Categorical perception of vowel duration in bat-bad, from Peter Ladefoged's Vowels and Consonants
http://www.phonetics.ucla.edu/vowels/chapter10/percpetial.html
- Categorical Perception of place of articulation in stops, USC. Includes online demo and interactive results
- Introduction to experimental paradigms used in speech perception research (behavioral responses).
- Materials by Mark Liberman, University of Pennsylvania
https://www.ling.upenn.edu/courses/Fall_2013/ling520/PerceptionLab1.html - Guide to experimental designs in speech perception by Grant McGuire, UCSC
https://people.ucsc.edu/~gmcguir1/experiment_designs.pdf
- Materials by Mark Liberman, University of Pennsylvania
- Multimodal speech perception
- McGurk effect, links to videos and demos by Karen Chung, National Taiwan University
http://homepage.ntu.edu.tw/~karchung/Phonetics%20II%20page%20seventeen.htm - Audiovisual Speech Web-Lab, by Michael S. Gordon and Lawrence D. Rosenblum, University of California, Riverside
http://www.faculty.ucr.edu/~rosenblu/lab-index.html- McGurk effect: demonstration http://www.faculty.ucr.edu/~rosenblu/VSMcGurk.html
- McGurk effect: experiment http://www.faculty.ucr.edu/~rosenblu/VSMcGurk.v1.html
- Video illustrating McGurk effect, by Dominic W. Massaro, UCSC
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T_tI7TQtmAE
- McGurk effect, links to videos and demos by Karen Chung, National Taiwan University
A.7 Phonetics databases and atlases
- Sound inventories
- User interface to the UCLA Phonological Segment Inventory Database (UPSID) compiled by Ian Maddieson and Kristin Precoda. You can search for sound segments and segment frequency in 451 languages. Interface created by Henning Reetz, University of Frankfurt.
http://web.phonetik.uni-frankfurt.de/upsid_info.html - PHOIBLE is a repository of cross-linguistic phonological inventory data by S. Moran and D. McCloy. Users can search segments, tones, sound inventories and language families and view them on the map
https://phoible.org/
PHOIBLE includes an online interface to UPSID:
https://phoible.org/contributors/UPSID - The World Atlas of Language Structures (WALS) is an interactive database of phonological, grammatical and lexical properties of languages by M. Dryer, Matthew & M. Haspelmath. The user can search for inventories, segments, features, tones, stress and any combination of features and view them on the map
https://wals.info/
- User interface to the UCLA Phonological Segment Inventory Database (UPSID) compiled by Ian Maddieson and Kristin Precoda. You can search for sound segments and segment frequency in 451 languages. Interface created by Henning Reetz, University of Frankfurt.
- Spoken corpora
- UCLA Phonetics Lab Language Archive, recordings of over 200 languages from around the world. Materials comprise audio recordings, phonetic transcriptions, and original field notes
http://archive.phonetics.ucla.edu/ - Speech databases from University College London. Corpora of spoken English, other European languages, and disfluent speech. Compilations of speech data available for researchers and students. These databases are not free
https://www.phon.ucl.ac.uk/resource/data.html - The Buckeye Corpus of conversational speech, Ohio State University. Recordings from 40 speakers in Columbus OH. The speech is orthographically transcribed and phonetically labeled. The audio and text files, together with time-aligned phonetic labels, are stored in a format for use with speech analysis software (Xwaves and Wavesurfer)
https://buckeyecorpus.osu.edu/ - International Dialects of English Archive (IDEA). Recordings of English dialects and accents from around the world. Read standard passages and unscripted speech, with demographic data of the speakers
https://www.dialectsarchive.com - Map Task Corpus. Collection of digitally recorded annotated dialogues and citation forms in several languages. Human Communication Research Centre, University of Edinburgh
http://groups.inf.ed.ac.uk/maptask/maptask-description.html
http://prosodia.upf.edu/atlesentonacio/Map-Tasks/index.html - The IViE corpus, English intonation in the British Isles. Audio files and associated materials of nine urban dialects of British English
http://www.phon.ox.ac.uk/files/apps/IViE/ - Linguistic data consortium makes available language corpora and tools for a license fee. Click on ‘Language resources’ and ‘Data’
https://catalog.ldc.upenn.edu/LDC93S12
- UCLA Phonetics Lab Language Archive, recordings of over 200 languages from around the world. Materials comprise audio recordings, phonetic transcriptions, and original field notes
- Atlas of North American English by W. Labov, S. Ash and Ch. Boberg. It illustrates phonetics, phonology and sound-change in American English dialects, as well as the principles and methods of dialect study
http://www.atlas.mouton-content.com/ - Speaking atlas of the regional languages of France and Italy. The ‘North wind and the sun’ fable spoken in the different dialects and languages of France and Italy.
- Atlas sonore des langues régionales de France
https://atlas.limsi.fr/?tab=Hexagone - Atlante sonoro delle lingue e dei dialetti d’Italia
https://atlas.limsi.fr/?tab=IT
- Atlas sonore des langues régionales de France
- Sound Comparisons: Exploring Diversity in Phonetics Across Language Families, from the Max Planck and Harvard Research Center. Sound files and transcriptions of the different pronunciations of the 'same' 100 words ('cognates') across a language family. Ten language families illustrated. Place the mouse over any map or table to hear the word
https://soundcomparisons.com/#home
A.8 Links to lists of resources and online demonstrations
- Jennifer Smith’s link list, University of North Carolina. Updated in 2016
https://users.castle.unc.edu/~jlsmith/phonetics-resources.html - Dani Byrd's Linklist, USC:
https://sites.google.com/view/uscphongroup/linklist - Joaquin Llisterri's Linklist, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona:
http://liceu.uab.es/~joaquim/phonetics/fon_gen/Rec_fon_web.html - University of York’s list of resources:
https://www.york.ac.uk/language/current/resources/areas/phon/