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The Praat program is a tool for phonetics research and can be downloaded for free from praat.org.
Paul Boersma & David Weenink (1992–2022): Praat: doing phonetics by computer [Computer program]. Version 6.2.06, retrieved 23 January 2022 from https://www.praat.org. |
At least, that is the style required by the American Psychological Association. The journal that you publish in may require a different style. If the journal does not allow you to cite a computer program, you can cite the following instead:
2001 | Praat, a system for doing phonetics by computer. Glot International 5(9/10): 341–345. (These pages include a review by Vincent van Heuven.) |
The following article is a tutorial on acoustic analysis, i.e. what the waveform, the spectrogram and the pitch curve tell you about durations, formants, pitches and more:
2013 |
Acoustic analysis.
[preprint, 2013/02/02] In Robert Podesva and Devyani Sharma (eds.): Research methods in linguistics, 375–396. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. |
The following article can be read together with Praat’s Intro (under Help). It shows you some of the basic windows in Praat and how to work with TextGrids (it also explains how to create a corpus):
2014 |
The use of Praat in corpus research.
[preprint, 2012/04/16] In Jacques Durand, Ulrike Gut & Gjert Kristoffersen (eds.): The Oxford handbook of corpus phonology, 342–360. Oxford: Oxford University Press. |
The following article describes Praat’s pitch extraction and HNR algorithms:
1993 | Accurate short-term analysis of the fundamental frequency and the harmonics-to-noise ratio of a sampled sound. IFA Proceedings 17: 97–110. The world’s most accurate pitch-extraction algorithm: measures F0 with an accuracy of 10-6, and HNR values up to 60 dB. |
The following article evaluates Praat’s jitter, shimmer, and HNR algorithms:
2004 |
Stemmen meten met Praat (measuring voices with Praat). Stem-, Spraak- en Taalpathologie 12: 237–251. Preprint: 2004/12/23, 13 pages. |
Here is an English version (of the jitter part):
2009 |
Should jitter be measured by peak picking or by waveform matching? Folia Phoniatrica et Logopaedica 61: 305–308. |
The following article describes Praat’s pitch-corrected LTAS algorithm:
2006 | Paul Boersma
& Gordana Kovačić: Spectral characteristics of three styles of Croatian folk singing. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 119: 1805–1816. [licence] |
The following article describes a method for improving formant measurements by adapting the ceiling:
2009 | Paola Escudero, Paul Boersma, Andréia Schurt Rauber & Ricardo Bion: A cross-dialect acoustic description of vowels: Brazilian and European Portuguese. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 126: 1379–1393. [licence] |
Here is an example of scripting in Praat, applied to Ton Wempe’s pitch-independent spectral analysis:
Praat’s articulatory synthesizer is described in chapters 2, 3, and 5 of Functional Phonology (1998). For historical completeness, here are two earlier papers:
1995/08 | Interaction between glottal and vocal-tract aerodynamics in a comprehensive model of the speech apparatus. Proceedings of the 13th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences, Stockholm, vol. 2, pp. 430–433. [Abstract] |
1993/05 | An articulatory synthesizer for the simulation of consonants. Proceedings Eurospeech ’93, Berlin, pp. 1907–1910. [Abstract] |
The best way to consult the Praat manual is to look under Help in the Praat program. That gives you the newest version of the manual, and a search option. For historical completeness, here are some published versions of (parts of) the manual:
Go to Paul Boersma’s home page.