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I was recently invited to be interviewed on the topic of "visualizing linguistic data". As I understand it, the point was not to describe the standard stuff, like trees, dependency graphs, logical formulae, or waveforms, spectrograms, spectral slices, formant tracks, F0 tracks, and so on. Rather, the idea was to describe less common kinds of visualizations, or at least somewhat novel ways of using the standard visualizations.

I've done a lot of "visualizing linguistic data" over the years. And talking about these explorations strikes me as problematic, partly because the whole point of visualization is to go beyond talk, and partly because I've used lots of kinds of graphs and tables to explore lots of different questions at different levels of analysis, and it's hard to know where to start and where to stop.

So I've started by makiing a linked list of relevant LLOG posts, mostly on the phonetic side of things. There are a lot of them, and I'm sure I've left some out. I doubt that any readers will want to do more than click on a few at random — my goal was mainly to give myself (and maybe the interviewer) some background for a possible discussion.

I've listed the posts in chronological order, rather than by topic. FWIW, here they are:

"An internet pilgrim's guide to accentual-syllabic verse", 7/6/2004
"Does size matter?", 10/1/2004
"The rhetoric of silence", 10/3/2004
"Sex doesn't matter", 11/11/2005
"The shape of a spoken phrase", 4/12/2006
"Sex and speaking rate", 8/7/2006
"One 75-millisecond step before a 'man'", 10/3/2006
"What Neil Armstrong said", 10/6/2006
"Poem in the key of what", 10/9/2006
"More on pitch and time intervals in speech", 10/15/2006
"You say potato, I say bologna", 10/8/2007
"Regional speech rates", 10/13/2007
"Puzzle of the day: The constitution in B flat?", 10/20/2007
"Nationality, Gender and Pitch", 11/12/2007
"How about the Germans?", 11/14/2007
"Do men and women use different parts of their natural pitch ranges?", 11/17/2007
"Rock syncopation: stress shifts or polyrhythms?" 11/26/2007
"Arom on polyrhythms", 11/29/2007
"Slicing the syllabic bologna", 5/5/2008
"Another slice of syllabic sausage", 5/6/2008
"Stress timing? Not so much", 5/8/2008
"Stress in Supreme Court oral arguments", 6/17/2008
"Uptalk anxiety", 9/7/2008
"How fast do people talk in court?", 3/11/2009
"Conversational rhythms", 4/13/2009
"Bembé, Attis, Orpheus", 5/6/2009
"'ma koMA ko SA' … 'ma MA ku SA'", 6/27/2009
"Richard Powers on his way to a decision", 10/28/2009
"Inaugural Speed", 9/14/2010
"Kennedy Speed: Fact or Factoid?", 9/15/2010
"Rap scholarship, rap meter, and The Anthology of Mondegreens", 12/4/2010
"Prosodic lettering", 5/8/2011
"Finch linguistics", 7/13/2011
"Markov's Heart of Darkness", 7/18/2011
"Non-Markovian yawp", 9/18/2011
"Raising his voice", 10/8/2011
"Vocal fry: 'creeping in' or 'still here'?", 12/12/2011
"Speech and silence", 1/12/2013
"Biology, sex, culture, and pitch", 8/16/2013
"The message", 8/26/2013
"English prosodic phrasing", 9/21/2013
"Speaker change offsets", 10/22/2013
"Speech rhythms and brain rhythms", 12/2/2013
"The long get longer", 12/4/2013
"Speech rhythm in Visible Speech", 12/18/2013
"Consonant effects on F0 of following vowels", 6/5/2014
"Consonant effects on F0 are multiplicative", 6/6/2014
"Consonant effects of F0 in Chinese", 6/12/2014
"The shape of a spoken phrase in Mandarin", 6/21/2014
"Men interrupt more than women", 7/14/2014
"Combating stereotypes with stereotypes", 10/17/2014
"Phrasal trends in pitch, or, the lab subject's moan", 11/7/2014
"Sarah Koenig", 2/5/2015
"Vocal creak and fry, exemplified", 2/7/2015
"Effects of vocal fry on pitch perception", 3/5/2015
"Political pitch ranges", 4/22/2015
"Modeling repetitive behavior", 5/15/2015
"The shape of a spoken phrase in Spanish", 5/29/2015
"More Pinker Peace creak", 7/25/2015
"And we have a winner", 7/27/2015
"The great creak-off of 1969", 7/28/2015
"Investigation of Fundamental Frequency (2)", 2016 lecture notes
"Solaar pleure carrément?", 1/30/2016
"Political sound and silence", 2/8/2016
"Poetic sound and silence", 2/12/2016
"Some speech style dimensions", 2/27/2016
"'An essay towards establishing the melody and measure of speech'", 3/20/2016
"Some phonetic dimensions of speech style", 4/9/2016
"Trumpchant in B flat", 10/2/2016
"Some visualizations of prosody", 10/23/2016
"Carl Kassell, diabolus in musica?", 11/5/2016
"Tunes, political and geographical", 2/2/2017
"Inaugural addresses: SAD", 2/5/2017
"The shape of a LibriVox phrase", 3/5/2017
"Political sound and silence II", 5/30/2017
"Trends in presidential speaking rate, 6/1/2017
"A prosodic difference", 6/2/2017
"Gender, conversation, and significance", 7/26/2017
"Audiobooks as birdsong", 6/10/2018
"Emergency in B flat", 2/17/2019
"Towards automated babble metrics", 5/26/2019
"Cumulative syllable-scale power spectra", 6/11/2019
"Syllables", 2/24/2020
"English syllable detection", 2/26/2020
"Syllable rhythm in English and Mandarin", 2/28/2023
"What do you hear?", 3/1/2020
"The dynamics of talk maps", 9/30/2022
"New models of speech timing?", 9/11/2023

Neville Ryant and Mark Liberman, "Large-scale analysis of Spanish /s/-lenition using audiobooks", ICA 2016
Neville Ryant and Mark Liberman, "Automatic Analysis of Speech Style Dimensions", InterSpeech 2016

August 16, 2025 @ 8:48 am · Filed by Mark Liberman under Language and science

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