Other resources

Table of Contents

Video/audio editing

  • Praat
    • praat.org
    • the number 1 speech-editing software in academia
    • supports speech measurements, annotation in TextGrids, manipulation, synthesis
    • scripting interface supports batch processing
    • recommended scripting interface: PraatVSCode
  • ffmpeg
    • ffmpeg.org
    • a command line tool for batch video processing
    • ’lives’ in the terminal (e.g., command prompt)
    • Adobe Premiere Pro is a great video-editor when working on individual files, but is not the best solution for batch processing. ffmpeg is great at efficiently and quickly extracting the audio channels from a large set of video files, converting mpg to mp4, manipulating audio/video temporal alignment (asynchrony), etc.
  • MediaPipe
    • mediapipe.dev
    • 2D video motion-tracking tool in Python, developed by Google
    • input: video file of a single person (OpenPose is preferred for multi-person tracking).
    • output: x, y, (estimated) z coordinates of body landsmarks + video with superimposed tracking skeleton.
    • here’s a great tutorial by Wim Pouw and James Trujillo at Envision Bootcamp.
  • WebMAUS
  • EasyAlign
    • http://latlcui.unige.ch/phonetique/easyalign.php
    • forced-alignment tool taking wav files and txt files with orthographic transcripts as input, providing TextGrids as output
    • ’lives’ in Praat (plugin)
    • French, English, Spanish, Brazilian Portuguese, Taiwan Min
    • annotations at word-level, syllable-level and phone-level

Corpora

  • MultiPic
    • https://www.bcbl.eu/databases/multipic/
    • standardized set of 750 drawings with multilingual name agreement and visual complexity norms
    • in color; 300 x 300 pixels; DPI=96 pixels/inch
    • Spanish, English (British), German, Italian, French, Dutch (Belgium), Dutch (Netherlands)
    • also useful when looking for ‘imageable’ words
  • Severens et al.
  • SUBTLEX
    • http://crr.ugent.be/programs-data/subtitle-frequencies/subtlex-nl
    • database of Dutch word frequencies based on 44 million words from film and television subtitles
    • also available for other languages, including US English (SUBTLEX-US), UK English (SUBTLEX-UK), Mandarin Chinese (SUBTLEX-CH), Spanish (SUBTLEX-ESP), German (SUBTLEX-DE), Greek (SUBTLEX-GR), Polish (SUBTLEX-PL), Italian (SUBTLEX-IT), Brazilian Portuguese (SUBTLEX-PT-BR)
    • reliable predictor of lexical decision reaction times, outperforming Google Books Ngram=1 (Brysbaert et al., 2011)
  • ANW
    • Algemeen Nederlands Woordenboek
    • Dutch word list, allowing searching with regular expressions (“spraa*”) and with particular word characteristics (number of syllables, stress on syllable n, etc.)
    • NOTE. I’ve found that the search lists are not exhaustive. Failure to find certain words in ANW does not necessarily mean they do not exist.
  • Lombard speech corpora
    • Acted clear speech corpus: English; 1 male talker; ’normal’ sentences; 25 items; babble-modulated noise; Mayo et al. (2012), doi:10.7488/ds/138.
    • Hurricane natural speech corpus: English; 1 male talker; Harvard sentences (720 items) and MRT sentences (300 items); speech-modulated noise; Cooke et al. (2013), doi:10.7488/ds/140.
    • DELNN: L1 Dutch and L2 English from 30 native speakers of Dutch (+9 native speakers of US English as control); speech-shaped noise; Marcoux (2022, PhD thesis).
    • RaLoCo: Dutch; 78 talkers; 48 sentences; speech-shaped noise; Shen (2022, PhD thesis). Additional info, including human listening effort ratings and HEGP scores (spectral glimpsing metric of intelligibility).
    • Also see our very own NiCLS corpus of Lombard speech.

Writing tools

  • Thesaurus
  • Zotero
    • zotero.org reference manager
    • use the Zotero Connector in your browser to store a paper, including fulltext and all bibliographic specs
    • use the Zotero Word Plugin to cite papers in a Word document, automatically generating a bibliography at the end of the document
    • easily change bibliography styles (from author-year in APA to numbered-lists in IEEE)
    • supports open fulltext search, notes and tags, organize in folders, etc.
    • preferred over other reference managers because Zotero is institute-independent, free, open-source, and very flexible.
  • Overleaf

Online experimenting

  • Prolific
  • Gorilla
    • Gorilla Experiment Builder
    • graphical interface so easy to use, no scripting or code, supports video stimuli, reliable audiovisual synchrony, headphone screening tests, great support, validated reaction times, build for free
    • graphical interface is less efficient for tweaking and copy-pasting (compared to code, so prepare for lots of clicking…), pay for data collection per participant (paid tokens), some institutes including RU and MPI have institution licenses (‘free’ tokens) but many do not, whether you can use Gorilla depends to a large extent on what institute you’re at.
  • PsyToolkit
    • psytoolkit.org
    • free to build, free to run, code-based so efficient, works well with audio stimuli, extensive documentation and how-to’s, headphone screening tests, institute-independent
    • code-based so steep learning curve, not great with audiovisual stimuli, little support
  • I have also used FindingFive (used to be free, now paid) and Testable (paid but free tokens for new users, has its own online participant pool) but I prefer the tools above.

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Last updated on Jul 7, 2022