Advanced phonetics

Aims

Aims

This module aims:

• to give students an understanding of the acoustics of speech, how speech acoustics relates to production and perception in articulatory terms
• to equip students with the ability to reason about speech based on a range of phonetic evidence and using theoretical as well as practical tools
• to equip students with the ability to design simple but effective data collection for further analysis

Programme

Programme

Contact hours

There is a 1 hour lecture and 2 hour practical each week.

Teaching programme

You will know and understand the essentials of the acoustics of speech, including:

• Sound as an acoustic and auditory phenomenon
• The source-filter theory of speech production
• Acoustic properties of the source and filter
• Articulation and resonance
• Common ways of representing speech acoustically: waveforms, spectrograms, spectra, F0 traces
• Contextual effects on speech sounds (illustrated through English)
• How the acoustics of speech relates to articulation

You will know and understand the essentials of speech perception, including:

• The basics of hearing
• Acoustic cues to speech sounds
• Categorical perception

You will know and understand some of the issues in data collection, including:

• Making recordings
• Sampling in digital recordings
• Designing materials for recording

You will be able to do the following things:

• Reason about speech production and perception, combining articulatory, acoustic and auditory evidence
• Use software for the acoustic analysis of speech, and to produce images for insertion into documents
• Design a simple acoustic phonetic study, taking ethics into account

Teaching materials

Key texts:

• Gloria Borden, Katherine S. Harris, Lawrence J. Raphael: Speech Science Primer
• Nigel Hewlett, Janet Beck: An introduction to the Science of Phonetics
• Keith Johnson. Acoustic and Auditory Phonetics (3rd edition), Wiley-Blackwell, 2012
• J. M. Pickett: The Acoustics of Speech Communication

Assessment

Assessment

Formative work

• a short lab report

Assessment

• open exam