The Speech, Lexicon, And Modeling lab is dedicated to cutting-edge research at the intersection of speech production and perception (phonetics) with speaker’s knowledge of words (lexicon). We use a wide range of methods, including corpus analysis, computational modeling, and acoustic and articulatory phonetic experiments.

We are part of the English Language and Linguistics section of the Institut für Anglistik und Amerikanistik at Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf. We are housed in building 23.21 on the HHU campus, and have a large additional laboratory space at 24.21.U1.022.

Lab News

• Chris Geissler gave an invited talk at the Institute for Phonetics and Speech Processing at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München. Slides
  
• SlamLab conducted a workshop on Free and Open Source Software. More details here: LibreSlam.
  
• Akhilesh Kakolu Ramarao won first prize for his presentation at the HeiCAD Lightning Talks.
  
• Prof. Dr. Kevin Tang gave a talk on Reanimating African American Oral Histories of the Gulf South at the Information Science Department, HHU. Talk
  
• Won the NVIDIA Academic Hardware Grant. The lab will soon have 20 × NVIDIA JetsonTM Nano Developer Kits to foster Digital Humanities and AI with Internet of Things(IoT). Further Info
  
• Won the e-Learning support fund of €9.424, Heinrich-Heine University Düsseldorf. Further Info
  
• Chris Geissler presents in LSA Webinar: “Dr. Christopher Geissler and his coauthors presented at a “Meet the Authors” webinar of the Linguistics Society of America (LSA). The event, “Gender Bias and Stereotypes in Linguistics Research and Teaching” highlighted two papers recently published in the LSA’s flagship journal, Language. You can see slides from the presentation here, a complete recording here, and read the Dr. Geissler’s article, “Gender Bias and Stereotypes in Linguistics Example Sentences” here.
  Slides
  Webinar recording
  Paper
  
• Chris Geissler published in Language: Congratulations to Dr. Christopher Geissler, whose work appears in the December 2021 issue of Language. The article, ““Gender Bias and Stereotypes in Linguistics Example Sentences,” written in collaboration with Hadas Kotek, Rikker Dockum, and Sarah Babinski, examines the distribution of gender in the example sentences published in three major linguistics journals over the past twenty years. The results show that example sentences include twice as many male-gendered characters as female-gendered ones, with female-gendered characters are further underrepresented as grammatical subjects, agents, and experiencers.
  Check out the full results as well as recommendations for linguistics researchers and teachers here, and browse the rest of the issue here.
  Article pre-print
  Language December 2021 issue: https://muse.jhu.edu/issue/47002
  

Joining Our Lab

The SLaM Lab invites interested students to join our lab. This can take many forms, from paid employment as a research assistant (“HiWi”) to writing a major project such as a term paper, B.A. thesis, or M.A. thesis. If you would like to get involved, please submit a current C.V. and a short cover letter (maximum one page). Your letter should highlight any of the following:

• relevant coursework and other experience (e.g. term papers, research experience) in phonetics, phonology, morphology, computational linguistics, computer science, or data science
  
• skills and experience in data visualization, statistics, programming languages
  
• language skills (especially English, Japanese, Korean, Tibetan)
  
• interests in linguistics or computational linguistics
  
• long-term interests (e.g. future career interests)
  
  

We welcome students of a variety of experience levels. The purpose of the SLaM lab is both to conduct research and, through research, to train students. We will match students with tasks appropriate to their skills, and support their training as needed.

Submit your CV and cover letter to either geisslc [at] hhu [dot] de or kevin.tang [at] hhu [dot] de.