The University of Victoria Speech Research Lab was founded in 2007 through a Canadian Foundation for Innovation (CFI) Leaders Opportunity grant awarded to Dr. Sonya Bird. The SRL infrastructure includes state-of-the art equipment for the collection and analysis of data on:

1) the articulation of speech sounds by speakers (articulatory phonetics),
2) the acoustic signal association with these speech sounds (acoustic phonetics),
3) the perception of this signal by listeners (auditory phonetics).

The SRL supports various research projects related to phonetic variability, i.e. the variability that is intrinsic to the speech signal. On the speech production side, studying phonetic variability involves acquiring and analyzing acoustic and articulatory data on how speech sounds vary when they are uttered by speakers. On the speech perception side, studying phonetic variability involves acquiring auditory perception data on how listeners deal with the variability they encounter when listening to speech: what aspects of variability do they use to understand speech and its context, and what aspects do they treat as ‘random variation’ and ignore? Given the wealth of indigenous languages spoken in the areas surrounding UVic, this research program focuses on phonetic variability in these languages, which have so far received very little attention from phoneticians.


Research conducted in the lab and using lab equipment in the field has been supported by grants from SSHRC, the Jacobs Fund, The Philips fund, and the University of Victoria.