Research Update

I've talked a lot recently about how I've been learning to cook a few things. It's time for a research update... Research tends to feel kind of spurt-y to me. There are periods that seem intensely fruitful, and others when I feel like I'm just treading water. Fortunately, the current period is one of the fruitful ones. I recently wrapped up teaching a course this semester on Speech Acoustics via webcast to the Budapest University of Technology and Economics. The experience was great, and a small handful of the students put together a nice conference paper based on one of the lab assignments (it's going to be presented at the upcoming Interspeech conference in Brighton, UK). One of the final papers for the class was a very well done research project which I hope the student is going to submit to the upcoming ICASSP conference, or another similar conference. Meanwhile, back at the ranch, I finally wrote up the paper based on a poster I presented at the ASA conference back in November and submitted it for publication in the conference proceedings (online only). The ASA proceedings are a new ASA publication, and this was the first paper I had submitted to it. I was very happy to find out in only one week that the paper was accepted. In the meantime, I've been working on another paper based on a poster I co-presented at the ASA conference in May. This paper is closely connected with the previous one, as well as with the final paper of my student in Budapest. I am hoping to submit this paper by the end of this week, but we'll see. And finally, I've also started writing a full journal paper with my May ASA co-presenter and my Budapest student, combining the results of all three projects into one, streamlining it, systematizing it, and adding some new findings. It will take a substantial amount of work, but it should be a nice paper when all is said and done.

One thing that I have discovered in the last week (when all this writing has been taking place) is that it is much easier now for me to write my papers than it used to be. Specifically, it is getting to be very easy to write Introduction and background sections. Methods sections are generally straight-forward, and it's getting easier to write Discussion and Conclusion sections. Presenting the new results is still a bit challenging. I just think it's interesting how easy it has become to write Introductions, in particular. I guess it's because I've written enough Introductions on this topic (my specialty), and as I learn more and collect more data and write more papers, there's more to say and it just comes more naturally. It's nice. :-)

I'm now starting to think about writing a paper specifically for phonologists/phoneticians. Most of my papers so far have been a little outside the scope of what a linguist would typically read. But I think that linguists would be interested if it were presented to them appropriately. So I'm thinking of trying to get a small number of people from a wide range of langauge backgrounds to record, and write a paper about the vowels and consonants with respect to subglottal acoustics in a cross-linguistic study. We'll see how far I get with that any time soon. :-}

Oh, I also need to write a proceedings paper based on a second poster that I co-presented in May. That paper will be more difficult to write.

I don't plan to attend any more conferences this year (too expensive), but the ASA next November (2010) is in Cancun.....Hmmmmm..... Might be a nice place to visit. :-)

So that's it. Research is going well. Can't wait to have my own lab with my own students some day...