Corpus-based approaches to the phonological analysis of speech

This special issue is a collection of selected papers from the 14th Conference on Laboratory Phonology, which was held at NINJAL (National Institute for Japanese Language and Linguistics) in Tachikawa, Tokyo, on July 25–27, 2014. The conference was sponsored by NINJAL with cooperation from four academic societies related to language and speech in Japan: the Acoustical Society of Japan, the Linguistic Society of Japan, the Phonetic Society of Japan, and the Phonological Society of Japan. The general theme of the conference was “Laboratory phonology beyond the laboratory: Quantitative analyses of speech produced outside the phonetics laboratory”. The papers selected for this special issue were drawn from the conference thematic session on corpus-based approaches, and present corpus studies of spontaneous speech, endangered languages, and L1 phonology/prosody. Seven articles were selected and reviewed for inclusion in the present volume. Mazuka et al. and Zellou and Scarborough analyzed corpora of infant-directed speech. Mazuka et al.’s analysis is based on a corpus of Japanese mothers’ spontaneous speech directed to their infant children and on a comparison with adult-directed speech and read speech. They use the corpus to demonstrate that a phonologically-informed analysis of infant-directed speech can reveal specific ways in which segmental and supra-segmental aspects of phonology are modulated dynamically to accommodate the specific communicative needs of speakers and hearers. Zellou and Scarborough, on the other hand, compare two corpora of English utterances, infant-directed in one and adult-directed in the other, and explore the extent to which age-of-acquisition and neighborhood density predict phonetic variability in the two sets of data. The papers by Den and Hasegawa-Johnson et al. deal with issues of statistical modeling. Using a large-scale corpus of spontaneous Japanese, i.e., the