Liberal Arts and Sciences
Speech, Lexicon and Modeling Laboratory (SLaM)
Led by Ratree Wayland · Linguistics
What we study
The SLaM lab, co-directed by Dr. Wayland, studies speech sounds and grammar (phonetics and phonology) and word knowledge, including computational linguistics. Her projects include machine learning on speech to tell apart types of parkinsonism, and how children and second-language learners perceive tone and accent.
What working here is like
- Computational
- Human participants
- Coding required
- Project
- 1
- Papers
- 5
What we're looking for
“It provides research opportunities for undergraduate and graduate students. We welcome curious and motivated UF students from a wide range of disciplines (from Engineering to Digital Humanities) to join us.”
Current projects
Demystifying perceptual evaluations of parkinsonism sub-categorizations using machine learning
Using speech patterns to classify Parkinsonism subcategories like PD, PSP, and MSA.
Summaries are written by AI in plain language from public symposium abstracts and may be imperfect.
Recent papers, explained
- Phonological Feature Posteriors and Cue-Specific Accent Perception in Hindi- and Tamil-Accented English
2026 · Brain Sciences
Examined Hindi- and Tamil-accented English to see if accent strength reflects uniform or cue-specific phonological differences.
- Acquisition of Similar versus Different Speech Rhythmic Class
2026 · Cambridge University Press eBooks
Analyzed rhythmic patterns in English, German, and French speech to see if shared rhythm helps L2 learning.
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- Spectral Bandwidth Effects on Emotion Classification and Representation in Spoken and Sung Signals
2026 · Signals
Shows emotion recognition improves with higher-frequency audio, beyond standard 8 kHz bandwidth.
- An Investigation of the Phonetic Variation of the Word-Initial /l/ and /n/ Across Regional Varieties of Mandarin
2026 · Language and Speech
Compares how Beijing, Changsha, and Meizhou Mandarin speakers produce /l/ and /n/ acoustically.
- Perceptual asymmetries in the development of lexical tone perception in Thai-learning children
2026 · Journal of Child Language
Finds children better distinguish dynamic-static tone pairs than static-dynamic ones in Thai.
Plain-language summaries are AI-written and reviewed by us; check the paper for details.
How to reach out
Ratree Wayland hasn't set up this page yet. Their UF Scholars profile lists their publications.