Getting Started

Phon is a software program that supports the building of textual and phonological data corpora. While it was originally created to support the study of child language development, Phon can be used across virtually all types of corpus studies (e.g. textual, phonological, acoustic, clinical) based on child or adult language data. Among other features, Phon offers specialized support for research on phonological units (e.g. phones, phonological features, stress, tones) and includes some specialized functions for clinical speech analysis. Phon also incorporates Praat functions for acoustic data analysis.

For a full list of tutorials see: Tutorial Videos

Note: Phon does not currently support M1 macs.

• Tutorial Videos

• Demo Project

  • README for Demo Project

Hedlund, Gregory & Yvan Rose. 2020. Phon 3.1 [Computer Software]. Retrieved from ​https://phon.ca.

Rose, Yvan & Brian MacWhinney. 2014. The PhonBank Project: Data and Software-Assisted Methods for the Study of Phonology and Phonological Development. In Jacques Durand, Ulrike Gut & Gjert Kristoffersen (eds.),  The Oxford Handbook of Corpus Phonology. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 308-401.

Rose, Yvan, Brian MacWhinney, Rodrigue Byrne, Gregory Hedlund, Keith Maddocks, Philip O’Brien & Todd Wareham. 2006. Introducing Phon: A Software Solution for the Study of Phonological Acquisition. In David Bamman, Tatiana Magnitskaia & Colleen Zaller (eds.), Proceedings of the 30th Annual Boston University Conference on Language Development. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press. 489-500.

We encourage you to subscribe to the discussion group for helpful information and technical support. Please click on the following link to request membership to the PhonBank (or other TalkBank-related) discussion group:

• http://talkbank.org/share/email.html

  • No Google mail (gmail) account is required to subscribe

  • Group’s email address (for message posting): phon@googlegroups.com

Funding: Current development of Phon and PhonBank is supported by the National Institutes of Health. Earlier development of Phon was funded by grants from National Science Foundation, Canada Fund for Innovation, Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, Petro-Canada Fund for Young Innovators, and the Office of the Vice-President (Research) and the Faculty of Arts at Memorial University of Newfoundland.

Dictionaries: Built-in dictionaries of pronounced forms were obtained from generous organizations and people, to whom we are indebted:

• Catalan: Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya http://www.upc.es/

• Dutch (Flemish): Fonilex Database http://bach.arts.kuleuven.be/fonilex/

• English (British): Cambridge University Engineering Department,Cambridge,UK http://svr-www.eng.cam.ac.uk/comp.speech/Section1/Lexical/beep.html

• English (North American): CMU Pronouncing Dictionary (Speech at CMU) http://www.speech.cs.cmu.edu/speech/

• French: Lexique Database http://www.lexique.org/

• German: Universität Bonn http://www.sk.uni-bonn.de/forschung/phonetik/sprachsynthese/bomp

• Icelandic: The Icelandic Centre for Language Technology http://www.tungutaekni.is/materials/e001.html

• Italian: ISTC-SPFD CNR, Istituto di Scienze e Tecnologie della Cognizione http://www2.pd.istc.cnr.it/FESTIVAL/home/default.htm

• Norwegian: Norwegian Computational Lexicon (NorKompLeks), Institutt for språk og litteratur, Norges teknisk-naturvitenskapelige universitet https://www.ntnu.no/isl

• Spanish (Spain): Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya http://www.upc.es/

• Spanish (Latin America): Scott Sadowsky http://sadowsky.cl/

Special thanks: While it is impossible to name everyone who ended up being involved in one way or another in this project, we owe special thanks to a wonderful group of early adopters and beta testers, students and researchers alike, without whom it would have been much more difficult to produce the current software program. We are also grateful to Paul Boersma for this tremendous collaboration toward the interactions between Praat and related functions within Phon 2.