Laboratory and Research Support

The LiRI lab for experimental research is equipped with a bundle of data acquisition units, mainly for use in phonetics, psycholinguistics and neurolinguistics. They are available to researchers and to external partners. If you are interested to use them, please contact Andrew Clark, the LiRI lab manager, by email: lab@linguistik.uzh.ch.

Further details about the rules and regulations for the lab use and the equipment can be dowloaded here: 

The LiRI Lab

The lab can be devided into three main parts: the speech lab, EEG booths and behavioral testing cubicles.  The speech lab consists of five recording booths that can be used for indevidual experiments or simultaniously allowing for up to five participants to interact in the same experiment.  Each booth is fitted with recording equipment.  Two of the booths are separated by an acoustic window for visual contact between participants.  All five booths are fitted with an AV system that also allows for visual contact between each booth.

There are two electromagnetically shielded booths for running EEG experiments.  The booths are equipped for running high density experiments with up to 160 channels and have the possibility of registering electrode positions.

A further booth in the lab can be used for running either hearing tests, screening tasks or behavioural experiments.

Lab Equipment

The lab is equipped with a wide range of equipment allowing the investigation of any aspect of language. Beyond audio recording, the speech lab also has an Electromagnetic Articulograph (EMA), Ultrasound Tongue Imaging (UTI) system, laryngographs and a number of other devices for doing research in speech science.

For investigating the relationship between language and the brain the lab has three EEG systems: two Brain Products ActiChap amplifyers (up to 160 channels) and a BioSemi Active-II amplifyer (up to 128 channels).  The Biosemi system includes the 'high-speed' option making it suitable for experiments examining early auditory responses.  There is also an fNIRS system and neuromodulation equipment.

The lab also has screen based eyetrackers, a motion tracking system, equipment for auditory screening and a system for recording a variety of physiologic responses.

A full equipment list can be found here.

Loan equipment

The equipment loan service includes the equipment that you would expect for field research including audio recorders, microphones and video cameras.  There is also a wide variety of equipment available so that experiments can be conducted in the field or used at other institutions.  This includes EEG systems, wearable and screen based eyetrackers & fNIRS. 

A full list of the availabe loan equipment can be found here.

LiRI also has licences for a variety of software both for experiment presentation and data analysis.  These are available both for loan with a laptop or on a dedicated data processing system in the lab.  LiRI also hosts its own RedCap server for research data collection and surveys.

A full list of the availabe software can be found here.