Remote sociophonetic data collection: Vowels and nasalization over video conferencing apps
Bibliographic record
Abstract
When the COVID-19 pandemic halted in-person data collection, many linguists adopted new online technologies to replace traditional methods, including video conferencing applications (apps) like Zoom (Zoom Video Communications, San Jose, CA), which allow live interaction with remote participants. This study evaluated the suitability of video calls for the phonetic analysis of vowel configurations, mergers, and nasalization by comparing simultaneous recordings from three popular video conferencing apps (Zoom; Microsoft Skype, Redmond, WA; Microsoft Teams, Redmond, WA) to those taken from professional equipment (H4n field recorder) and an offline iPad (Apple, Cupertino, CA) identical to those running the apps. All three apps conveyed vowel arrangements and nasalization patterns relatively faithfully, but absolute measurements varied, particularly for the female speaker and in the 750-1500 Hz range, which affected the locations (F1 × F2) of low and back vowels and reduced nasalization measurements (A1-P0) for the female's prenasal vowels. Based on these results, we assess the validity of remote recording using these apps and offer recommendations for the best practices for collecting high fidelity acoustic phonetic data from a distance.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".