Eleanor Chodroff

Eleanor Chodroff

@echodroff.bsky.social

Cognitive scientist, linguist, phonetician at the University of Zurich Dept. of Computational Linguistics

2.7K followers461 following82 posts

Eleanor Chodroff reposted

I don’t know that we have made it clear enough to the general public/international community how the NSF is just…not funding social and behavioral science research anymore? Like?

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We also find some support for a biomechanical explanation, especially for /a/. However, we argue that this would depend on an additional assumption: some aspects of phonetic implementation need to remain uniform across vowels to yield systematic acoustic differences.

Across more than 60 languages, we find that high vowels are shorter than low vowels in the vast majority of languages and speakers, while vowels differing primarily in backness show no systematic durational bias.

Eleanor Chodroff reposted

🤯 Phonetic Universal Uncovered! 🎤 We analyzed over 60,000 speakers across 75 languages and confirmed a universal phonetic bias: High vowels (like /i, u/) are consistently spoken with a slightly higher pitch (F0) than low vowels (/a/).

doi.orgOSF

Eleanor Chodroff reposted

The Spoken Language group @bcbl.bsky.social is currently recruiting for these positions: 👉PhD students (expressions of interest are welcome on a rolling basis) 👉Postdoctoral Researcher (start date: Nov '26 - Sep '27) tinyurl.com/3um3bjze 👉Research Assistant tinyurl.com/y5uebra6 Please share ☺️

tinyurl.comSPONSORSHIP FOR JUAN DE LA CIERVA POSTDOCTORAL FELLOWSHIP - SPOKEN LANGUAGE GROUP (E.K)at the BCBL- Basque Center on Cognition Brain and Language (San Sebastián, Basque Country, Spain) www.bcbl.eu

Eleanor Chodroff reposted

Please join @mariamaly.bsky.social and me October 30th! We'll help you navigate the confusing world of peer review.

Reviewer Zero@reviewerzero.bsky.social

You’re ready to submit your first paper. What happens next? Our workshop, Peer Review 101: Responding Effectively to Reviews, will help you understand how peer review works and provide you with concrete tools so you can respond to a reviewer comments. Join us 12-1:30pm ET 10/30/25. Register here:

Eleanor Chodroff reposted

Replying to @cl-uzh.bsky.social

A memorial service, followed by a reception, will take place on Friday, 14 November at 5:00 PM in the Aula (KOL-G-201) of the main building of the University of Zurich (Rämistrasse 71, 8006 Zurich).

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The differences are small but consistent in direction, supporting a biomechanical account critically tied to uniform phonetic targets across vowels. At the same time, variation in effect size across languages suggests speakers differ in how strongly this uniformity is realized

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Previous explanations have focused on two explanations: 🗣️Automatic accounts 👂Speaker control As a novel contribution, we reinterpret intrinsic vowel duration as a statistical universal emerging from the competing pressures of target uniformity and enhancement

We provide a large-scale crosslinguistic corpus analysis of intrinsic vowel duration – the observation that high vowels (like /i/ or /u/) tend to be shorter than low vowels (like /a/) Our dataset: ✅ 60+ languages ✅ 16 language families ✅ Thousands of speakers

Eleanor Chodroff reposted

📢PhD fellowships The Spoken Language group at #BCBL (Spain) offers sponsorship for the #INPhINIT Predoctoral Fellowships Potential PhD projects can be related to: 🗣️Speech perception 🧠Language learning ℹ️Info about the position and application process: tinyurl.com/2kcfsjr3 📆Deadline: October 30

bcbl.euSPONSORPSHIP for INPHINIT PREDOCTORAL FELLOWSHIP - SPOKEN LANGUAGE GROUPat the BCBL- Basque Center on Cognition Brain and Language (San Sebastián, Basque Country, Spain) www.bcbl.eu

🗣️Mozilla Common Voice users!🗣️ Important notice: the client ID does not always correspond to a single speaker ID! Every so often, a single client ID contains more than one speaker’s voice. Our #Interspeech2025 paper examines the extent of this problem and proposes a solution

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Pairs below this were more likely perceived as different speakers and above, as the same speaker. Of course there’s no ground truth, so you can also choose your own threshold The similarity scores, paper, and code can be found at the below links Happy data cleaning 😊

🗣️Mozilla Common Voice users!🗣️ Important notice: the client ID does not always correspond to a single speaker ID! Every so often, a single client ID contains more than one speaker’s voice. Our #Interspeech2025 paper examines the extent of this problem and proposes a solution

We ran automatic speaker verification (ResNet-293 trained w/ multilingual VoxBlink2) to obtain similarity scores among files for each client ID. Based on previous thresholds and a perceptual evaluation, we found an optimal threshold of ~0.35–0.40 for same vs diff speakers

Eleanor Chodroff reposted

Had such a great time presenting our tutorial on Interpretability Techniques for Speech Models at #Interspeech2025! 🔍 For anyone looking for an introduction to the topic, we've now uploaded all materials to the website: interpretingdl.github.io/speech-inter...

interpretingdl.github.ioInterpretability Techniques for Speech Models — Tutorial @ Interspeech 2025
Grzegorz Chrupała@grzegorz.chrupala.me

And that's the whole team behind the tutorial on interpretability techniques for speech models at IS2025.

Eleanor Chodroff reposted

Hey, if you know sociolinguistics and phonetics, there's a beer-money temporary part-time job available at Glasgow University: (don't be fooled by the salary range -- buried in the fine print is the specifics that it's a 0.4 FTE job). #linguistics #academicChatter.

jobs.gla.ac.ukTutor / Lecturer in Phonetics and Sociolinguistics (LTS)College of Arts and HumanitiesSchool of Critical Studies Tutor / Lecturer in Phonetics and Sociolinguistics (LTS)Vacancy Ref: 178252Salary, Grade 6/7, £33,482 - £37,174 / £40,497 - £45,413 per ann...