Resources

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Resources for speech and language-focused cognitive scientists!

The following is a list of various resources I’ve collected over the years. This is mainly for my own reference, but please don’t hesitate to contact me should any of these links no longer work or if you have additional questions.

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Praat

As we are all aware, using Praat can be a pain, so here are a few collections of useful scripts I’ve found

  • first and foremost, a collection maintainied by Joe Toscano can be found on this website
  • here are some scripts from Matt Winn (you can find quite a few useful links from his site as well)
  • some links from the phonetics lab at UCLA
  • this excellent tutorial on extracting formants with a praatscript by Joey Stanley
  • and another collection of handy scripts from Christian DiCanio
  • and another for more specific voice processing needs
  • a super helpful collection of scripts from Dr. Michelle Cohn

Tandem Straight

Tandem Straight is a speech modification tool that is a re-engineering of the original STRAIGHT by Dr. Hideki Kawahara. It’s fairly handy if you need to synthesize some stimuli. It’s beneficial in that it is able to morph along several different dimensions and maintains a fairly natural quality.

  • currently the best guide I’ve seen, by Michael McAuliffe
  • or if you’re interested in doing multiple talker morphing - check out my quick tutorial
  • or head straight to the source, Dr. Hideki Kawahara’s homepage

Lab.js

Lab.js is a useful program for making online studies created by Dr. Felix Henninger. It’s usefulness comes in it’s fairly easy-to-use, intuitive online graphical interface builder (no-code required. well, not really) at lab.js.org as well as it’s downloadable lab.js package which allows for building studies from scratch in javascript if that’s what you prefer.

  • you can find the documents for the builder here
  • and for the javascript library documentation here or go straight to the source on their github
  • although if you have any specific questions, their slack channel is the best place to go where you can usually find your answer, or get a quick response

Psychopy

Psychopy or Psychojs are both additional software to create studies from scratch in either javascript (for online studies) or python (for in-lab studies) or through their graphical interface. Psychojs currently has the fastest timing on online studies out of a collection of surveyed online experimental software. So if timing is something really important in your study, psychojs might be the best option.

  • You can head to their main page to learn more about it!

Psychopy is nice to use because it’s fairly intuitive and has a really easy to use graphical interface that you can download onto your computer. The interface makes it super easy to make studies from scratch that you plan to run in-lab.

  • or if you want to run your study online: psychojs is another good option

You can build your studies as you would normally in your psychopy builder and then export the html to an online repository (pavlovia) so you can run your studies online. Keep in mind that pavlovia charges to host your studies - not very much money, but charges nonetheless.

  • you can find the documentation for psychojs here

for information about timing in Psychopy and Lab.js (and other experiment software) check out this paper

Mechanical Turk

Mechanical Turk is an online crowdsourcing platform created by Amazon. Many researchers use this to run their experiments online quickly and easily. Depending on how much control you want to have over your studies, this can either be an easy or quite difficult option for running your studies online.

Scholarships/Fellowships/Grants you should know about

Language scholarships

Please feel free to email me if you have any questions about either of these ones. I received both of them and have my old essays around somewhere.

Graduate Fellowships

Here is some general advice about writing grants (at any stage in your career) for social science researchers

Some helpful information on both the Ford and GRFP can be found at Carl Fields' website

And a list of GRFP example essays and information can be found at Alex Lang’s website

And even more info can be found at Dr. Mallory Ladd’s personal website

Post-doc and Career Fellowships/Grants/Programs

This is an interesting one if you’re interested in working in Germany. This program is for early-career researchers and provides funding for up to 4 years to work as a project lead at a German institution with the assumption that foreigners who participate will stay in Germany following completion of the program. This early career program can be followed by the Heisenberg program.

This is a program directed primarily at those researchers who have qualified for professorship via the Emmy Noether Programme. So if that’s a path you want to go down, these two would be good to look into.

The Hakubi Fellows Program, RIKEN offers junior PI positions for independent research by exceptionally talented individuals. The program, established in 2017, encourages active exchange between the fellows, and seeks to develop the next generation of leading researchers with a global outlook. This would be a good position if you’d like international experience at a research center in Japan.

Similar to the program above, this is just for women.

Other Grants (misc)

Writing and/or advice about grad school

Misc.

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  • look no further than BitWit to guide you through the building process
  • don’t know where to start on a build? mix and match beforehand on pcpartpicker

Want to build a mechanical keyboard?

Want to build a website??

  • check out hugo a super easy way to build a website from (basically) scratch