Congratulations to Ella De Falco on receiving the 2024-2025 Graduate Research Excellence Award!
Ella’s research investigates the acoustics of emotion in speech. Her dissertation work focuses on the intersection of phonetics, affective science, and computational linguistics. She is currently analyzing the acoustic correlates of emotion from several corpora designed for speech emotion recognition. During the 2024-2025 academic year, she has also begun to create a corpus of speech emotion for Panãra, a Jê language of the Amazon with advisors Myriam Lapierre and Richard Wright and committee member Gina-Anne Levow.
Developing a speech emotion corpus for a small Indigenous language requires extensive preparation work and collaboration with the community. The Graduate Research Excellence Award has supported this work by allowing Ella to devote one quarter fully to methodology, data processing and experimental design. During this time, she has also made significant progress toward graduation requirements and prepared a manuscript on vowels in Panãra for publication.