Emeritus Professor Andy Butcher

Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities

ARC Discovery Project Grant
2005-2007 "An instrumental investigation of consonant sequences in a northern Australian language" (with J Fletcher, Uni of Melbourne)
This project investigated the consonant sounds of a northern Australian language, Bininj Gun-wok, by measuring both the acoustic speech signal and various physiological parameters, using electropalatography and aerometry.

ARC Discovery Project Grant
2007-2009 "The relationship between speech production and perception in Australian language speakers: implications for speech development and learning in Aboriginal children" (with J Fletcher, U Melbourne and M Tabain, La Trobe U)
This project studied the potential effects of hearing loss and instruction in a foreign language (English) on the development of speech and literacy in children who speak an Australian Aboriginal language.

ARC Linkage Infrastructure, Equipment and Facilities Grant
2010 "The Big Australian Speech Corpus: An audio visual speech corpus of Australian English" (with DK Burnham, UWS; FM Cox, Macquarie U; JM Fletcher, U Melbourne and many others too numerous to mention)
Contemporary speech science and technology are driven by the availability of large speech corpora. While audio databases existed for languages spoken in America, Europe and Japan, there was no large auditory visual database of spoken language, and certainly not one for Australian English. This project established the Big Australian Speech Corpus, which will support speech science research and development using Australian English and facilitate the development of Australian speech technology applications from automatic speech recognition and text to speech synthesis used in many telephone ordering services, to hearing prostheses and talking head aids for learning impaired children, and a range of security and forensic applications.