Runword

Runword is a set of software tools developed to run psycholinguistic experiments (mostly reading single words aloud from print), and in particular, to digitize and record vocal responses. Runword can take these digitized vocal responses and extract various dependent measures from them such as reaction time, response duration, segment and syllable duration, and peak amplitude and pitch. Runword also enables you easily listen to a subject's responses and code them for errors or other reasons.

Runword is publically available, but there are a number of obstacles and warnings that must be heeded. These are:

It requires a SoundBlaster 16-bit sound card with speakers and a microphone. Other sound cards do not work.
It runs in DOS, so it needs the old SB16 DOS drivers.
It may encounter memory problems with large blocks of trials (over 100, depending).
The onset of some stimulus and the onset of microphone recording may be delayed by some small amount. The mean and variance of that amount is currently unknown.
The duration of recording may differ from the requested duration by some small amount. This does not affect the acoustic measures to my knowledge.
The presentation of large text may delay the onset of the stimulus from the onset of timing by a small amount (e.g., one refresh cycle), depending on your system.
The 80x24 presentation mode should not introduce any delay (besides the normal rounding up to the nearest refresh interval), but this cannot be guaranteed.
The documentation covers most but not all aspects of the software.
It is freeware, so there is no guaranteed support if you have problems with installation and/or usage.

The bottom line is that the software needs an overhaul. Unfortunately, I do not have the time nor resources to do this. It is still potentially useful in its current form; based on our results with Runword, the amount of measurement error is relatively small, and the code may be useful to someone who wants to "roll their own". So, here it is:

Runword 2.0 (921K zipped), executables, source code, and documentation

To unzip the file runword.zip, first make a directory where you want the software to go (e.g., mkdir c:\runword). Copy runword.zip into this directory, then go into the directory and type pkunzip -d runword.zip. You can then print out the manual in the \doc subdirectory and work from there. Here is pkunzip if you need it.

Also, I would like to point out two other sources of code that may be useful if you are interested in Runword:

Speech Filing System. (from their site) "SFS provides a computing environment for conducting research into the nature of speech. It comprises software tools, file and data formats, subroutine libraries, graphics, standards and special programming languages. It performs standard operations such as acquisition, replay, display and labelling, spectrographic and formant analysis and fundamental frequency estimation. It runs under Unix, DOS and WIN32 environments and is currently running on Sun, Hewlett-Packard, Masscomp, Alpha, Linux and 486+PC. SFS is copyrighted University College London, but is currently supplied free of charge to research establishments for non-profit use. SFS is supplied as is with no warranty or support."

Snack sound extension for Tcl/Tk. (from their site) "Snack is an extension to the Tcl/Tk scripting language which makes it possible to create powerful multi-platform audio applications. Snack adds commands for basic sound handling, e.g. sound card and disk I/O. Snack also has primitives for sound visualization, e.g. waveforms and spectrograms. It was developed mainly to handle digital recordings of speech, but is just as useful for general audio. Snack has also succesfully been applied to other one-dimensional signals. The combination of Snack and Tcl makes it possible to create sound tools and applications with minimum effort thanks to Tcl's rapid development nature. As a bonus you get an application that is cross-platform from start. It is also easy to integrate Snack based applications with existing sound analysis software."

For some time, a 32-bit beta version of Runword was available for download. I had begun writing this code to fix the memory limitations, expand the capabilities of Runword, and make it compatible with different sound cards. However, additional bugs were found in the new code (thank you Jason Zevin, Dan Spieler, and Zenzi Griffin), and I no longer have the time to fix them. The bugs are the following:

The delay in activating recording after stimulus onset may be greater than in the 16-bit version.

In some versions of the beta code, there is a delay of up to two refresh cycles (rather than one) before stimulus onset.

The time necessary to draw a picture can create a significant delay in the time course of a trial, depending on the size of the picture.

It still only works with the SB16 card.

The added measurement error is still unknown, but it seems large enough to prohibit use (definitely in the case of pictures). My apologies to those who were adversely affected by these bugs. I have learned the lesson of refraining from making beta code available unless there is time to finish it.