TTh 10:00-12:50 – NH 385

Jeff Conn                      connjc@pdx.edu                 503-725-4099                    East Hall 241

Office Hours: Tues 12:30-2:30 & by appointment              webpage:  http://web.pdx.edu/~connjc/

Course description

 

This course is of value to all those interested in the sounds of human language and how sounds are used in speech communication.  The course also provides an introduction to the application of phonetics to such areas as language acquisition, speech pathology, speech synthesis and speech recognition, as well as to how slight phonetic differences function on the social side of language, in such areas as dialectology, sociolinguistics, language variation, and language change.  In addition, the course complements such core linguistics courses as phonology, discourse analysis, and even psycholinguistics and neurolinguistics.  The course deals also with the application of phonetics to language pedagogy, especially to the teaching of English as a second language.

 

Students are introduced to the scientific study of speech sounds, primarily as these sounds occur in English but also as they are found in other languages.  Students will learn what it is that makes English phonetically special, and how English differs from other languages.  They will be able to conduct such an analysis on the firm scientific tradition of descriptive phonetics, beginning (in English) with the great 19th century phonetician Daniel Jones (immortalized in My Fair Lady as “Henry Higgins” [ÈEnrI ÈIgn`z]) (Collins & Mees 1999), and continuing with an unbroken laying on of hands to the participants in this phonetics course.

 

We will spend a fair amount of time learning how to analyze speech sounds acoustically, that is, by means of measuring such speech features as amplitude and frequency.  At the end of the course students should be able to interpret spectrograms and other acoustic displays.

 

The course is grounded in practical skills, such as listening carefully to speech sounds and faithfully transcribing them.  Students will be expected to demonstrate their proficiency in such skills.  In addition, students will also learn to produce sounds not found in English.  Such sounds include the “exotic” clicks of the Khoisan peoples of southern Africa and the bilabial trill (“Bronx cheer”) of, e.g., the Kele (Cameroon).  With only a little practice and some understanding of articulatory phonetics, students will be able to produce all possible sounds and will learn to appreciate the wonder of human speech.

Required Text

Ladefoged, Peter. 2005. A Course in Phonetics (5th ed.). Boston, MA: Thomson Wadsworth.

Recommended Texts

Johnson, Keith. 2003. Acoustic and Articulatory Phonetics (2nd ed). Cambridge, MA and Oxford, UK: Blackwell.

Ladefoged, Peter. 2005. Vowels and Consonants: An Introduction to the Sounds of Languages (2nd ed). Malden, MA and Oxford, UK: Blackwell.

Ladefoged, Peter, and Ian Maddieson. 1996. The Sounds of the World’s Languages. Oxford, UK and Cambridge, MA: Blackwell Publishers.

Final grades are determined on the following basis:

 

Undergrads

Grads

 

10%

10%

Class participation

30%

25%

Quizzes

30%

25%

Homework

30%

25%

Final exam

 

15%

Language description

Class participation. The mark for class participation depends first of all on regular attendance. More importantly it depends on being prepared and actively contributing to class discussion. Students will be regularly asked to contribute in class, for example, to demonstrate various sounds of the world’s languages. There will also be in-class, small-group practice with listening and producing sounds. Students are strongly encouraged to work together on all aspects of the course.

·       Class attendance

·       Preparation

·       Active involvement

 

Quizzes.  Quizzes are the graded version of the homework.  Students not present for the quizzes will receive a “0” (no marks).  Excused absences can be arranged around quizzes PRIOR to the quiz date.  Quizzes include such tasks as the following:

Ÿ  Transcription from a written text        Ÿ  Transcription of oral stimuli    Ÿ  Short answer

 

Homework. Homework exercises will come from the book and other sources.  These exercises are turned in, discussed in class, but not graded for correctness.  You get credit for just doing them, but neglecting to turn them in will hurt your grade.  Each homework is worth 10 points.  Any homework turned in late will receive only 8 points.  There are 11 possible homeworks due, but the total possible is for 10 (can do 1 for extra credit or skip one).  The exercises in the book are available on the CD and on the website so you should not have to rip the pages from your book to turn them in.  The computer labs should be equipped with some IPA font or another in Microsoft Word, but you can download them for free at:

http://www.sil.org/computing/fonts/Lang/silfonts.html

Or here: http://www.phon.ucl.ac.uk/home/wells/fonts.htm

 

Final project (graduate students only). The “Language description” for graduate students will be a project based on elicitation with a single informant, a native speaker of a language other than English. The exact nature of the project will be determined on the basis of future discussion and class interests. A final presentation of the results to the class as a whole is scheduled for the last day of class.

 

Final exam. The exam covers all of the course material and is fairly objective in its nature.  It includes performance as well as listening (transcribing) components.

·       Course content: Objective true-false, multiple choice, and short-answer questions

·       Acoustic analysis: Interpret acoustic displays such as spectrograms and be prepared to make inferences as to the significance of the displays

·       Perception: Transcription from oral stimuli provided by instructor

·       Production: Students will be expected to produce a set of sounds chosen at random from sounds of the world’s languages


TTh 10:00-12:50 – NH 385

Jeff Conn                      connjc@pdx.edu                 503-725-4099                    East Hall 241

Office Hours: Tues 12:30-2:30 & by appointment              webpage:  http://web.pdx.edu/~connjc/

 

Course calendar

 

Week

Tuesday

Thursday

1

1 (T 27 Sept) Introduction

Bureaucratic preliminaries

 

2 (Th 29 Sept) Read Ch 1 -Articulation and Acoustics

Ch 1 Ex A-C, pp. 24-26

2

3 (T 4 Oct)  Ch 1

Read Ch 2 - Transcription

Ch 1 Ex D, E, G, I, J, pp. 27-32

4 (Th 6 Oct)  Ch 2 - Transcription

Ch 2 Ex A-C, E (only identify diffs), I  pp. 48-50

3

5 (T 11 Oct) Ch 2 -Transcription

Ch 3 - English Consonants

Quiz 1 – Chaps.  1 & 2

6 (Th 13 Oct) Ch 3 - English Consonants

Ch 3 Ex A & D, pp. 76-80

4

7 (T 18 Oct) Ch 3 -English Cons

Ch 4 – English Vowels

Quiz 2 - Eng Cons

8 (Th 20 Oct) Ch 4 -English vowels

 

5

9 (T 25 Oct) Ch 4 - English vowels

Ch 4 Ex C-F, H, pp. 101-103

Quiz 3 – Eng Cons

10 (Th 27 Oct) Ch 5 - English Words and Sentences (No need to know ToBI)

Ch 5 Ex B, D, E, F, pp. 128-130

6

11 (T 1 Nov) Finish Ch 5

Ch 6 - Airstream Mechanisms and Phonation Types

Quiz 4 – Ch 4 & 5

12 (Th 3 Nov) Ch 6 - Airstream Mechanisms and Phonation Types

Ch 6 Ex C-E, pp. 153-155

 

7

13 (T 8 Nov) Ch 7 – Consonantal Gestures

 

14 (Th 10 Nov) Ch 7 – Consonantal Gestures

Ch 8 – Acoustic Phonetics

Ch 7 Ex A-D, pp. 177-178

8

15 (T 15 Nov) Ch 8 – Acoustic Phonetics

Quiz 5 – Consonantal Gestures

16 (Th 17 Nov) Ch 8 – Acoustic Phonetics

Ch 9 – Vowels etc

Ch 8 Ex A-C, pp. 208-209

9

17 (T 22 Nov) Ch 9 – Vowels and Vowel-like Articulations

Ch 9 Ex A, p. 231

(Th 24 Nov)

Thanksgiving

 

10

18 (T 29 Nov) Ch 10 – Syllables and Suprasegmental Features

Quiz 6 – Ch 8 &9

Ch 10 Ex A, F-G, pp. 254-256

19 (1 Dec) Review, grad student presentations

1st half: review – 2nd half: grads

 

Final Exam: T 6 Dec, 10:15-12:05