18 September 2007

Opa: stimulus presentation software for speech production experiments

Opa is a text presentation program designed to be used by researchers conducting speech production experiments.

What does Opa let you do?
· Display words (optionally on a second monitor).
· Place words within a carrier phrase.
· Randomise the presentation of words.
· Ensure that certain word combinations are not presented on consecutive trials.
· Loop the presentation so that all words are displayed x number of times.
· Judge a participant’s productions as either good or try again.
· Append rejected productions of words to the end of the list, so that you may have x number of approved recordings.
· Log the presentation order of words and researcher ratings in a results file.

What are the advantages of using Opa?
· It is small (384KB) - memory footprint is negligible.
· Present text in any language.
· The Opa algorithm allows for complex randomisation.
· User centred design – Opa status bar displays onscreen text (including the carrier phrase), allowing the researcher to know what the participant can see at all times.
· It is free – created in-house by MARCS programmer Johnson Chen.

System requirements
Opa was designed for Windows XP and requires the Microsoft .NET 1.1 framework.

User guide
For detailed instructions, please download the Opa manual that I created.

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