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Part of
Multilingual Acquisition and Learning: An ecosystemic view to diversity
Edited by Elena Babatsouli
[Studies in Bilingualism 67] 2024
► pp. 169–192

Chapter 6
Multilingual data coding and analysis within Phon

A practical demonstration

| Memorial University

Research on multilingualism or based on multilingual speech data poses unique methodological issues, for example concerning the annotation of language-specific phenomena within data records involving multiple languages and/or speakers. To support this type of research, how can one build a unique corpus of data that can be analyzed either as a whole or on a language-by-language basis? The Phon software program provides a number of solutions to address such challenges. This paper demonstrates how to build and analyze data transcripts in ways that make possible both language-general measures of speech as well as language-specific ones.

Keywords: Phon, coding, multilingual, speech data, corpus, analysis
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.The PhonBank project
    • 2.1Database building and data sharing
    • 2.2Phon
  • 3.Analyzing multilingual data within Phon
    • 3.1Key concepts and related functions in Phon
    • 3.2Variation and the time dimension
    • 3.3Time alignment and transcription
    • 3.4Queries, reports, and analyses
  • 4.Illustrations
    • 4.1Phonological analyses
    • 4.2Illustration 1: Phone-level alignment
      • 4.2.1Phones query
      • 4.2.2Reporting
    • 4.3Illustration 2: Word-level alignment
      • 4.3.1Morphological annotations and the aligned word filter
      • 4.3.2Processing results beyond Phon reports
    • 4.4Illustration 3: Group-level alignment
      • 4.4.1Language annotations and the aligned group filter
      • 4.4.2Further methods and resources
  • 5.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 30 May 2024
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/sibil.67.06ros
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