2013 Linguistic Institute

This course introduces basic automation and scripting skills for linguists using Praat. The course will expand upon a basic familiarity with Praat and explore how scripting can help you automate mundane tasks, ensure consistency in your analyses, and provide implicit (and richly-detailed) methodological documentation of your research.  Our main goals will be:

    1.  To expand upon a basic familiarity with Praat by exploring the software’s capabilities and learning the details of its scripting language.

    2.  To practice a set of scripting best practices to help you not only write and maintain your own scripts but evaluate scripts written by others.

The course assumes participants have read and practiced with the Intro from Praat’s help manual. Topics to be covered include:

    o Working with the Objects, Editor, and Picture windows

    o Finding available commands

    o Creating new commands

    o Working with TextGrids

    o Conditionals, flow control, and error handling

    o Using strings, numbers, formulas, arrays, and tables

    o Automating phonetic analysis

    o Testing, adapting, and using scripts from the internet

This class will explore the basic principles that create and sustain the richness of the lexicon in human languages. We will consider how new words are created, how they are learned, and how they are replicated through social interactions in human communities. Empirical data will be drawn from classical sources, from language on the Internet, and from computer-based “games with a purpose”. Using concepts from research on population biology and social dynamics, we will also discuss mathematical approaches to modeling the life and death of words.