(Psyscope Button Box)

UCLA Phonetics Lab

PERCEPTION

The lab has two ways to run perception experiments with adult subjects.

First, a laptop running Matlab with the Psychtoolbox and optionally with a button box can be used in the lab's sound booth, in a soundbooth or testing room in the Psycholinguistics lab, or in the field. We use either a Telex P-800 (no longer sold) or the audio box for USB audio output, and recommend the Sennheiser sound-attenuating headphones. To prepare scripts, Matlab is also available on Ruby, Upton, and Tosca, or Henry will do it for you.

Second, the Psycholinguistics Lab has our old Macintosh with Psyscope (and extra memory), formerly in our sound booth. See below for some help with Psyscope.

Phonetics Lab collection of Matlab scripts for perception experiments

CELEX database for computing lexical statistics

Help with statistical analyses of perception data is on our lab statistics page.

PsyScope info
PsyScope is a free interactive graphic system for designing and running psychology, psycholinguistics, perception experiments on Macintosh computers.

Link to PsyScope Manual (requires Acrobat Reader 3.0)
Link to PsyScope Home Page
A brief introduction to PsyScope, in three parts (thanks to Adam Albright for providing this). This describes how to use PsyScope to run a couple simple scripts that are useful for phoneticians and phonologists: presenting stimuli on the screen to read, and collecting ratings in a ratings task:

Some other programs for running experiments which we do not use:

Kay Elemetrics program linked below, which we have but don't use
Eprime
Super Lab
BLISS by John Mertus at Brown University
Inquisit
Presentation

Auditory Perception Program and Database, Model 4343 (Kay Elemetrics Inc.)

For constructing perception experiments and to provide a convenient teaching and training tool for auditory and speech perception.
Link to Kay Home Page for Auditory Perception Program and Database.
Even though we don't use this program to run experiments, note that we do own the CD by this name, which contains "An inventory of pure tones and natural and synthesized syllables, words and sentences", which could be used as stimuli for experiments run in our usual ways. The files are in Kay's .nsp format so would have to be converted (to SoundEdit for Psyscope, to .wav for Matlab). The CD is in the General Lab, on the shelf where CDs are kept.

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last updated by Pat Keating Summer 2007