About the project
A small research project on how people from different places, and people learning English, pronounce English vowels. You read a short story and talk for a few minutes; you get a chart of where your vowels sit, how they compare with other speakers, and which contrasts you keep or merge.
What you get
An automatic analysis page like this one (a real chart from one of us). Blue: your vowels, each with its spread. Grey: where the reference speakers put the same vowels. Every measured token can be inspected.
It is a research build: it is automatic and some of it will be wrong. It judges vowels, never people.
What it takes
- About 8 minutes for the chart: a mic check and a short story read in five parts, on your phone or laptop, in a quiet room.
- 6 optional minutes of talking about three everyday topics, for a fuller analysis of how your vowels behave in normal speech.
- You can stop and come back; your link remembers where you were. Your analysis appears on your page, usually within an hour.
What is stored, and your rights
- Your recordings, the answers on the short form (native language, where you grew up, age range, sex — no name, no email), and the analysis.
- They are used to build and test pronunciation-coaching tools and may appear, without identifying you, in research write-ups. They are not sold or shared with third parties.
- Your page has a Delete my recordings button. It removes your recordings and analysis from the server, and the processing machine deletes its copies on its next pass. No questions asked.
- You must be 18 or over.
For moderators and the curious. This is an independent, non-commercial research project run by one person with a background in phonology (Alex Brittain), building and testing pronunciation-coaching tools. No account, name or email is collected; recordings and form answers are stored on the project's own hosting, are never sold or shared, and any participant can delete everything with one button at any time. Participants are 18 or over. See a complete example analysis (the author's own).
Questions or concerns: alex@lexic.live · Reddit: u/VeritasFallens