UCLA Phonetics Lab

The UCLA Phonetics Laboratory was established by Peter Ladefoged in the English Department in Fall 1962 and moved with him to the new Linguistics Department in 1966. The lab was directed by Peter Ladefoged until his retirement in 1991, then by Pat Keating until her retirement in 2022. The current Director of the Phonetics Lab is Sun-Ah Jun. Members of the lab include faculty, postdocs, graduate students, staff, and visiting scholars in Linguistics. In our research we document segments and prosody of a range of languages and describe their patterns as part of a linguistic system through the production and perception of adult native speakers. We also study how infants and children learn to perceive and produce the sounds of their native language(s). The UCLA Linguistics Department is well-known for the close cooperation between its phonetics and phonology programs.

The lab maintains facilities for teaching and research in adult and infant speech production and perception. Descriptions of our current facilities, and information about how to use them, are in the Resources section of this site, while courses and materials on phonetics are listed under Teaching, and grant projects and working paper information are listed under Research. Current and past members of the lab, and local colleagues with whom we collaborate, are listed under People. The UCLA Phonetics Lab has two sub-labs, Language Acquisition “Infant” Lab, and SPOG team (Speech and Cognitive Development).

The UCLA Phonetics Lab holds valuable databases, which you can access under Resources. UCLA Phonetics Lab Data (formerly Sounds of the World’s Languages) are organized for teaching, and UCLA Phonetics Lab Archive includes raw data files consisting of thousands of recordings of hundreds of speakers, some of which are acknowledged in full, others in part (with their first name) and still others who did not wish to be acknowledged. When available, these acknowledgements can be found under "Recording Details". UPSID (UCLA Phonological Segment Inventory Database) holds data from 451 languages, and finally, the Linguistic Voice Quality project archive includes audio and EGG recordings and spreadsheets of measurements on nine languages.