Global Communications Center
The Global Communications Center (GCC) at Northern Arizona University (NAU) offers undergraduate and graduate students opportunities to engage with cutting edge, hands-on empirical research related to speech production and perception of first and second language speakers and listeners. The Lab houses advanced speech acquisition and processing equipment and computers with specialized software that supports a vibrant research agenda. Numerous projects have successfully produced methodological innovations and novel findings in a variety of fields related to speech.
Staff
The GCC currently has one full-time post-doctoral researcher on staff and two part-time PhD students working on corpus transcription. The lab also supports the research efforts of a number of PhD students. The GCC is also getting network support from the Information Technology Services (ITS) of NAU.
Equipment
The lab has a computerized speech lab (CSL) 4300 from KayPentax, which provides capacity for both real-time and off-line speech signal acquisition and processing, and has 3 high speed computers/workstations equipped with Matlab, Praat and Snack speech processing software toolkits. These toolkits provide cutting edge techniques for prosodic feature analysis and processing. It is also set up with a high-speed multiprocessor (4 processors – each 2.3 GHz, 32 GB RAM, 1 TB HDD) mobile workstation and supporting data backup accessories, including CentOS 6.0 Linux virtual environment over Windows 7 for large vocabulary spontaneous speech recognition (LVCSR) training and decoding using KALDI, and HTK speech recognition toolkits.
Speech Corpora
The ALSL has several commercially available speech corpora: TIMIT Acoustic-Phonetic Continuous Speech Corpus, CSLU: Foreign Accented English Corpus, Boston University Radio News Corpus (BURNC), and LDC Switchboard corpus. Additionally, the lab has corpora obtained or collected and annotated by the ALSL: World Englishes, TOEFL, and Cambridge English Language Assessment.
Collaboration
A major strength of the GCC is its emphasis on interdisciplinary collaboration in both research and education. In the 2014-2015 academic year, the GCC sponsored an automatic syllabification Capstone project for five undergraduate students in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science department at NAU. For the 2015-2016 academic year, four Electrical Engineering and Computer Science undergraduate students are working on a phone recognizer Capstone project that is being sponsored by the ALSL. The GCC is under the direction of Dr. Okim Kang.