Guide to Annotation with PoLaR

A Brief Description of the Tutorial

This tutorial will familiarize participants with a new prosodic annotation system: PoLaR (Points Levels and Ranges). The primary goal of this tutorial is to provide participants with hands-on experience in PoLaR-labelling speech data from mainstream American English, which will enable them to PoLaR-label data from a variety of different languages, sources and contexts.

PoLaR is a new system of prosodic annotation (see PDF of guidelines here, and other resources here), developed to facilitate the labelling of individual prosodic characteristics and cues (thereby decomposing phonological labels such as H* or L-L% into their more atomic phonological and acoustic components). In addition to isolating particular prosodic qualities, PoLaR is intended as a system that can be applied to any register, dialect, or language. PoLaR may be useful for capturing and analyzing (potentially systematic) variability, both within and across various categories in phonological, semantic/pragmatic, and/or sociolinguistic domains.

Audience: Novice to experienced prosodic annotators (expected background and skills: familiarity with prosodic terminology, and with Praat)

Cost: Free!

Date/Time: Sat May 28, 2022, 9am-12:30pm Lisbon Time (UTC+1)
Schedule below

Location: Physical: School of Arts and Humanities, Room C248.A (2nd floor, east wing)
Virtual: Zoom link (emailed to registrants; contact us if you didn't get it!)

Reading: Before the meeting, read the opening section of the of our PoLaR manuscript (only 12 pages!). If you have time and are interested, you are encouraged to read on!

Hardware: Bring your own computer and (if you have them) your own headphones/earphones.

Software: If you’ve never used Praat before: follow the directions at the beginning of this guide to Praat.
If you have used Praat, update it!
Install the PoLaR plugin for Praat, according to the instructions on the GitHub page.

Files: All .wav/.TextGrid files for the tutorial can be found on Google Drive, in "GAP @ SP22 Shared Folder"