Last week I visited the PundP in Munich. Felicitas Kleber and Christoph Draxler did a wonderful job organizing this beautiful conference. The great thing about PundP is that it addresses not only phoneticians and phonologists who have been working in the field for a while, but also undergraduate students and PhD-students. It provides a friendly environment where one can find constructive criticism and great inspiration for one’s work.

I met wonderful friends there, among them Daniel Duran, who presented his revolutionary learning-and-testing environment; Adrian Leemann, who presented on his App “Dialäkt Äpp”, Cornelia Heyde, who studies the articulation of stutterers by means of ultra-sound and Mathias Scharinger, who is investigating neural mechanisms of perception.

This year, I myself presented the Karl-Eberhards-Corpus of spontaneously spoken southern German, work which I have been doing together with Denis Arnold for the last three years. The corpus consists of one hour conversations between two friends. It is annotated and corrected at the word level. Segment annotations are provided on a forced aligner basis.

Left: myself; right: Daniel Duran

The Career-Service of the University of Tübingen asked me whether I was interested to give a short interview for their interview course. The result is a short movie about my career in academia, posted on the website of Campus TV. Click on the Link to watch the movie.

There is plenty of stuff like books and articles I would like to read but simply don’t have the time.  On the other hand, I use the car to drive to work thinking: What a waste of time.
I found a solution:  a text-to-speech system for the smart phone called “@voice aloud reader“.

It is capable to process PDF files, text files, doc files and much more. It refers to the text-to-speech system already installed on your phone but you can install many more voices as well as languages.

Three and a half years ago I started working at the Department of Quantitative Linguistics, University of Tübingen. My new field of research was articulography, a method to monitor and record the movement of the tongue and lips during speech production.

Together with my colleagues Denis Arnold and Martijn Wieling, we made a movie to advertise for our experiments. Recently, I found the movie again on youtube:

More and more phoneticians, as I do,  rely on measures of experience, such as frequency of occurrences, in their investigations. I have been struggling with these for the last three years and ended up with a fairly easy accessible data base of frequencies for word forms and phones and biphones (phonotactic frequencies) for German.  It is based on CELEX and the SDEWAC corpus.

The database can be accessed here and a description here. How to cite the database is included in the description. Thanks for sharing and citing.

I updated some passages on scripting in R.  In addition, I included a new chapter on writing functions. The chapter also tackles how to write your code step by step.
I also included a table of contents with hyperlinks, which allows you to go directly to the chapter/section of your interest. Finally, I started an index.

Check it out here! Share it, if you like it!

I finally managed to upload appetizers of my fictional writings. Some of them even include nice drawings specifically made for the stories.

Check it out at https://fabian-tomaschek.com/published-texts/.

I realized that it has been a long time since I have posted something here.
I have to do this on a more regular basis. Today, I’ve added a slide elaborating my research. Check it out by going to –> Scientific work –> About me.

I absolutely know how hard it is to learn programming. Especially with a language like R. If you want to learn it right from the start, try out my new script here.

Finally I managed to start a new website. I have been unhappy with the old one for a while, especially because I could not upload content easily.

Let’s see, how this one will work.

Best

Fabian