Getting Started

Phon is a software program for building and analyzing textual and phonological data corpora. Originally created to support the study of child language development, Phon is used across a wide range of corpus-based research areas, including phonological development, second language acquisition, and clinical phonology. Phon offers specialized support for the study of phonological units (e.g. phones, phonological features, syllables, stress, tones), multi-blind IPA transcription and validation, automatic syllabification and phone alignment, and acoustic analysis through integrated Praat functions. Phon is a core component of the PhonBank project, part of the TalkBank system.

Phon 4 is the newest generation of the application. It introduces a redesigned, transcript-based Session Editor, a built-in AI assistant, light and dark interface themes, and closer integration with the TalkBank CHAT format. See Changes from Phon 3 for an overview of what has changed since Phon 3.

All releases are available at https://github.com/speechmetrics/phon-releases/releases.

Looking for Phon 3? Downloads and documentation for Phon 3 remain available at the previous Phon website: https://phon-ca.github.io/phon/.

Phon 4 is a major update. The most important changes from Phon 3 are summarized below.

• Transcript-based Session Editor — Records are now viewed and edited in a single continuous transcript, similar to a CHAT transcript, instead of one record at a time. Specialized views — including the Record List, Timeline, Media Player, Speech Analysis, Syllabification & Alignment, IPA Lookup, and Search — dock around the transcript and can be arranged into custom layouts.

• AI assistant (Schwa) — A built-in chat assistant that can answer questions from the Phon manual, inspect session data, and generate edit scripts. Schwa works with cloud model providers as well as local models via Ollama, and Phon can also act as an MCP server to make its tools available to external AI clients.

• Modernized interface — A refreshed look with light and dark themes, selectable in Preferences, and native file and system dialogs on macOS and Windows.

• TalkBank interoperability — An updated session format aligned with the TalkBank CHAT format, improved CHAT import and export, and a Publish Project wizard for packaging a project as a TalkBank-ready archive.

• Improved media and Praat workflows — Redesigned TextGrid import and export wizards, and word and phone interval tiers for working with time-aligned transcription data.

• Performance — Faster loading and editing of large sessions and reduced memory use.

For a full list of tutorials see: Tutorial Videos

• Tutorial Videos

• Demo Project

  • README for Demo Project

Hedlund, Gregory & Yvan Rose. 2020. Phon 3.1 [Computer Software]. Retrieved from https://phon.ca.

Rose, Yvan & Brian MacWhinney. 2014. The PhonBank Project: Data and Software-Assisted Methods for the Study of Phonology and Phonological Development. In Jacques Durand, Ulrike Gut & Gjert Kristoffersen (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Corpus Phonology. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 308-401.

Rose, Yvan, Brian MacWhinney, Rodrigue Byrne, Gregory Hedlund, Keith Maddocks, Philip O’Brien & Todd Wareham. 2006. Introducing Phon: A Software Solution for the Study of Phonological Acquisition. In David Bamman, Tatiana Magnitskaia & Colleen Zaller (eds.), Proceedings of the 30th Annual Boston University Conference on Language Development. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press. 489-500.

Funding: Current development of Phon and PhonBank is supported by the National Institutes of Health. Earlier development of Phon was funded by grants from National Science Foundation, Canada Fund for Innovation, Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, Petro-Canada Fund for Young Innovators, and the Office of the Vice-President (Research) and the Faculty of Arts at Memorial University of Newfoundland.

Dictionaries: Built-in dictionaries of pronounced forms were obtained from generous organizations and people, to whom we are indebted:

• Catalan: Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya http://www.upc.es/

• Dutch (Flemish): Fonilex Database http://bach.arts.kuleuven.be/fonilex/

• English (Australian): Australian lexicon, adapted and corrected from https://www.cstr.ed.ac.uk/projects/unisyn/ by Felicity Cox

• English (British): Cambridge University Engineering Department,Cambridge,UK http://svr-www.eng.cam.ac.uk/comp.speech/Section1/Lexical/beep.html

• English (North American): CMU Pronouncing Dictionary (Speech at CMU) http://www.speech.cs.cmu.edu/speech/

• French: Lexique Database http://www.lexique.org/

• German: Universität Bonn http://www.sk.uni-bonn.de/forschung/phonetik/sprachsynthese/bomp

• Icelandic: The Icelandic Centre for Language Technology http://www.tungutaekni.is/materials/e001.html

• Italian: ISTC-SPFD CNR, Istituto di Scienze e Tecnologie della Cognizione http://www2.pd.istc.cnr.it/FESTIVAL/home/default.htm

• Norwegian: Norwegian Computational Lexicon (NorKompLeks), Institutt for språk og litteratur, Norges teknisk-naturvitenskapelige universitet https://www.ntnu.no/isl

• Russian: The Russian dictionary of pronounced forms was contributed by Ekaterina Kistanova and Pavel Shostak. The inflected forms of Russian words, including stress marks, were automatically generated by Andrei Usachev based on: Zalizniak, A.A. (1977). Grammatičeskij slovar' russkogo jazyka. [Grammar dictionary of the Russian language]. Moskow: Russkij Jazyk. (https://web.archive.org/web/20200705182909/http://www.speakrus.ru/dict/)

• Spanish (Spain): Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya http://www.upc.es/

• Spanish (Latin America): Scott Sadowsky http://sadowsky.cl/

Special thanks: While it is impossible to name everyone who ended up being involved in one way or another in this project, we owe special thanks to a wonderful group of early adopters and beta testers, students and researchers alike, without whom it would have been much more difficult to produce the current software program. We are also grateful to Paul Boersma for this tremendous collaboration toward the interactions between Praat and related functions within Phon 2.

Install packages created using multi-platform installer builder .