Crowdsourced speech and automatic alignment: New frontiers for laboratory phonology

Martine Adda-Decker (LPP/CNRS)
Ioana Chitoran (Paris Cité University)
Johanna Cronenberg (LPP/CNRS)
Adèle Jatteau (U. Lille)
Lori Lamel (Vocapia Research)
Mélanie Lancien (U. Lorraine)
Mark Liberman (U. Penn.)
Anisia Popescu (LISN/CNRS)
Laura Spinu (City U. of New York)
Paola Tubaro (CREST/CNRS)
Ioana Vasilescu (LISN/CNRS)
Yaru Wu (U. of Caen Normandy)

Description: This workshop explores the shift from controlled laboratory recordings to crowdsourced and automatically aligned speech data. Advances in speech technology and annotation tools now enable large-scale phonetic research but raise questions about data reliability, interpretability, and ethics.  Alignment errors and variable recording conditions especially affect spontaneous and heterogeneous data, challenging traditional analytical assumptions. Bringing together perspectives from phonetics, phonology, speech technology, and the social sciences, the session examines how these new data practices reshape laboratory phonology and invites discussion on developing transparent, linguistically informed, and socially responsible approaches to large-scale speech analysis.