Isaac Spencer

Isaac Spencer has been working as a Research Scientist at NovaSpeech LLC since June 2004, after graduating magna cum laude from Cornell University with a Bachelor of Arts degree in Linguistics and English literature. Isaac wears many hats, supporting the company's research activities through a variety of tasks. He creates both hybrid and all-formant synthetic stimuli for perceptual experiments; he runs experiments; he enters data into and queries NovaSpeech's special relational database (which is used to coordinate all of our speech experiments); he writes Perl and Visual Basic scripts; he assists with technical papers and documentation; he researches phonetic and phonological topics; and much more (and no, you can’t have him!!).

At Cornell University, Isaac also gained extensive experience in phonetics and phonology. He took several upper-level and graduate-level courses in phonetics and related areas, including specialized courses such as Sue Hertz's hands-on speech synthesis course. He worked as a research assistant on an NSF grant (#BCS 0236734) awarded to Drs. Amanda Miller, Christopher Collins, and Bonnie Sands for the purpose of collaborative research on the Khoisan African language N|u. His primary tasks centered around describing N|u’s rich click inventory. For his honors thesis, Isaac investigated nasal clicks in another Khoisan African language, Khoekhoe, using nasal airflow data.