Using Computers
in Linguistics:
A Practical Guide

Education

Henry Rogers

Back to Education

 

General resources

 

Bibliography

 

Discussion groups

Specific Programs

 

BARLOW HYPERCARD STACKS

Simple interactive exercises for introductory course: Indo-European roots, exploring the relationship of PIE, Latin, Greek, and English; Grimm's Law; three morphology problems, comparative reconstruction of Polynesian; American English phonemic transcription; recognition of vowel of American and British English.

 

Basic Linguistics: Phonetics.

A Windows-based program on CD-ROM written with Authorware that allows the user to learn English phonetics. Sound files, animation, and extensive hyperlinks help the student to systematically learn the sounds of English and how to transcribe them. The module concludes with review tests and a final test that can be printed out and turned in to the instructor. With 1004 recorded words, each time the student takes the test, it is a new experience. This is the first module of a planned full course in Basic Linguistics.

  • Systems supported: Windows
  • Developer/Distributor: John McLaughlin, 434 West 100 North, Brigham City, UT, 84302, USA, tel. (214-)709-24045, fax (214-) 709-2433. mclasutt@brigham.net
  • Price: US $10.00

 

CG Laboratory [Categorial Grammar]

DCG Laboratory [Definite Clause Grammar]

PATR Laboratory

PSG Laboratory [Phrase Structure Grammar]

A group of programs for writing grammars in a form which can be manipulated by students to explore formal grammars. It helps the student understand the relationship between strings, rules and trees, and to grasp parsing, generation, ambiguity, and recursion.

  • Systems supported: Systems supported: Macintosh
  • Developer/Distributor: Linguistic Instruments, Department of Linguistics, University of Göteborg, S-412 98 Göteborg, Sweden. li@ling.gu.se .
  • Price: $40 each (single user)

 

CONC

A concordance program for the Macintosh specially designed for linguistic analysis. Conc produces keyword-in-context concordances of texts. The sorting order is defined by the user. The user can restrict which words will be included in or excluded from a concordance on the basis of frequency, length of word, inclusion in a list, or pattern matching. Conc can concord both flat text files and multiple-line interlinear texts produced by the IT program. Can also produce letter (character) concordances to facilitate phonological analysis.

  • Systems supported: Macintosh
  • Developer/Distributor: John V. Thomson. International Academic Bookstore, 7500 W. Camp Wisdom Road, Dallas, TX, USA, tel. (214)709-24045, fax (214) 709-2433. academic.books@sil.org .
  • Price: $4 in North America and $6 overseas
  • Review:
  • Bauer, Christian. 1992. "Review of Conc", Literary and Linguistic Computing 7(2):154-156.
  • URL: http://www.sil.org/computing/conc/conc.html

 

EDW

A speech display and editing program for preparing stimuli in speech perception experiments and as an aid in the acoustic analysis of digitised utterances. A spectrogram based on the waveform can be displayed along with the waveform itself. EDW has no built-in capability to digitize speech and relies on other programs to create the waveform files it is used to edit. Several auxiliary programs are included for basic acoustic analysis and measurement and for manipulating X-Ray Microbeam data.

  • Systems supported: MS-DOS ; Sun
  • Developer/Distributor: H. Timothy Bunell, Applied Science and Engineering Labs., Alfred I. duPont Institute, 1600 Rockland Rd., Wilmington, DE, 19899. bunnell@asel.udel.edu .
  • Price: free
  • URL: ftp://asel.udel.edu/pub/spl

 

ETHNOLOGUE

An on-line database of basic information about most languages in the world. It can be searched by language name, country or linguistic affiliation.

 

GRAMMAR AND TREES

A HyperCard stack containing a context free phrase structure parser and a tree drawing routine for students to explore context free phrase structure grammars, and particularly to see the relationship between rules and trees. Some sample exercises are included.

  • Systems supported: Systems supported: Macintosh
  • Developer/Distributor: Christopher Culy, Linguistics Department, The University of Iowa, Iowa City, IA 52242, USA. chris-culy@uiowa.edu
  • Price: $10 .

 

GTU [Grammatik-Text-Umgebung]

Tutorial software in computational linguistics. The program takes a given sentence, parses it, and displays its PS-tree.

  • Systems supported: MS-DOS
  • Developer/Distributor: Martin Volk, Institute of Computational Linguistics, Universität Koblenz-Landau, Rheinau 3­4, W­5400 Koblenz, Germany. martin.volk@informatik.uni-koblenz.de

 

The Interactive Introduction to Linguistics

An interactive introduction to general linguistics, covering phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, historical linguistics, and other topics. The authors recommend that it be used as a supplement to a course, not as a substitute for a course. Audio support. Available in English and German.

 

Introduction to Linguistics

Several stacks for use in an introductory class in linguistics, including phonetic transcription, phonological features, and acoustics. Hypercard.

 

IT [Interlinear Text]

A tool for building a corpus of analysed texts. The analysis is embodied in user-defined annotations which are displayed in a form that is unsurpassed for clarity of presentation--the form of interlinear, aligned text. IT also manages the database of lexical information derived during the analysis of texts.

K-TEXT

KTEXT is a text processing program that uses PC-KIMMO to do morphological parsing. KTEXT reads a text from a disk file, parses each word, and writes the results to a new disk file. This new file is in the form of a structured text file where each word of the original text is represented as a database record composed of several fields. Each word record contains a field for the original word, a field for the underlying or lexical form of the word, and a field for the gloss string.

  • Systems supported: MS-DOS, Macintosh, UNIX
  • Developer/Distributor: Evan Antworth, Academic Computing Department, Summer Institute of Linguistics, 7500 W. Camp Wisdom Road, Dallas, TX, 75236, USA. evan@sil.org
  • Price:

       

Language Games

A variety of on-line language games for first-year students in linguistics.

 

The Lexicon

The Lexicon is an on-line set of exercises. providing practice in breaking English words into morphemes and in drawing trees assigning the structures of words using tree diagrams.

LingNet Resources.

Offers on-line introductory linguistics and historical/comparative linguistics instruction to institutions of higher learning and to individuals. The courses are conducted using Utah State University's SyllaBase on-line instruction engine and only require that the student have regular access to a computer with an adequate browser installed. The courses are conducted asynchronously.

  • Systems supported: Windows
  • Developer/Distributor: John McLaughlin mclasutt@brigham.net
  • Price: US $250 for an individual student, or based on enrolment for a university course.
  • Contact LingNet Resources, 434 West 100 North, Brigham City, UT, 84302, USA.
  • http://dmrd.usu.edu/lingnet


Linguistic Fun

Linguistic Fun is an on-line collection of short discussions of a variety of topics useful for a first-year class.

 

LX Problems

A series of programs for introductory linguistics, covering phonetics, phonology, morphology, dialectology, and sociolinguistics. The problems combine sound and graphics to bring the user into close contact with the phonetics and culture of a particular dialect of a language. Analytical problems use a variety of computational techniques to lead the student to the correct solution. The program stores each action taken by the student in a separate file so that teaching assistants can review students' progress and problems. Hypercard.

  • Systems supported: Macintosh
  • Developer/Distributor: William Labov, Linguistics Laboratory, Univ. of Pennsylvania, 1106 Blockley Hall, Philadelphia, PA, 19104, USA. labov@central.cis.upenn.edu

       

MacLex

Creates and maintains a lexicon.

PC-KIMMO

Program for computational phonology and morphology. Typically used for testing morphological descriptions by relating lexical and surface forms. Takes two files - a rules file specifying the phonologic rules of language, and a lexicon file with glosses and morphotactic constraints - and takes the lexical form and produces the surface form or takes the surface form and produces the lexical form with its gloss.

  • Systems supported: MS-DOS, Macintosh, UNIX
  • Developer/Distributor: David Smith, Gary Simons, and Stephen McConnel. International Academic Bookstore, 7500 W. Camp Wisdom Road, Dallas, TX, USA, tel. (214)709-24045, fax (214) 709-2433.
  • Price: $24
  • URL: http://www.sil.org/pckimmo/

       

Phono

Phono is a software tool for developing and testing models of regular historical sound change. An ordered set of sound-change rules is tested either on a data file or interactively. It is accompanied by a model for Spanish.

 

Phthong

Hypercard stack for teaching phonemic transcription, using a graded set of cards introducing material in a cumulative fashion. First the transcription is from a phonemic transcription to ordinary English orthography, then from English orthography to phonemic transcription. Reviews and other exercises are also used. A setup module allows instructors to customise the transcription to fit their preferences or dialect area.

Signalyze

An acoustic analysis program. It allows digital speech signal editing, analysis, and manipulation. It includes multiple window display and zoom. It includes three types of pitch analysis; a variety of spectral analyses including Fourier analysis with several bandwidths, linear predictive coding, and cone kernal analysis; and cepstral analysis. Further functions include exportable data scoring, arithmetic and transcendental transformations, power and RMS envelopes, down- and up-sampling, derivative differences, and zero-crossings. Several sound formats are supported.

SPEECHLAB

An introductory course on phonetics, explaining acoustics, physiology and spectrography interactively, with a complete lexicon of German/American speech sounds, with videos, anatomical illustrations, acoustic analysis and detailed description of each sound, and a bibliography of 4000 items.

STAMP

Tool for adapting text from one dialect to another.

SYNTACTICA

A program for exploring grammars (phrase structure and lexicons) and the structures they generate. It generates syntactic trees using phrase-structure rules and lexicon.

Tarski's World

A program teaching modern logic. Allows students to build three-dimensional worlds and to describe them in first-order logic.

UMich Phonetics Training Tools

An ensemble of Hypercard stacks to assist beginning students of phonetics in associating symbols, sounds, and production. Includes sound files, animated vocal tracts, and X-ray movies for each speech sound. Can be accessed through an IPA-table interface or by manipulating a vocal tract on screen. Also, an IPA training game and a testing module, in which students are tested on their ability to associate IPA symbols, static vocal tract shapes, and physiological descriptions.

WinSAL-V

A speech analysis program allowing recording, segmenting and playing of audio and video files in multiple windows. Includes FFT, LPC, cepstrum, and pitch analysis.

WordSurv

Analyses word lists using lexicostatistics, phonostatistics, and comparative reconstruction. The program can be used in helping students to identify tentative comparative series for further testing

A World of Words

Eight stacks about how Indo-European languages have changed over time. Topics include Grimm's Law, Greek and Latin sounds, Maps and trees, Root and Branch, a close transcription of a Frost poem, a hypertext version of the Proöemium of Homer's Iliad. Hypercard.

YOUPIE

Attempts to learn stress system of any language using parametric approach. Sample words with stress indicated are input; they are first parsed into syllable and then sent to a stress-learner. The learner attempts to set the value of stress parameters. If successful, YOUPIE produces a prose description of the stress pattern of the language.

       

  • Systems supported: MS-DOS
  • Developer/Distributor: Elan Dresher, Dept. of Linguistics, University of Toronto, Toronto, Ont., M5S 3H1, Canada. dresher@chass.utoronto.ca