Course overview
Pronunciation immediately identifies each of us as belonging to a certain ethnic group, social class, locality, age group and gender. This course investigates the nature of speech sounds, the mechanisms of speech production and perception and the ways by which these sounds are classified into a fixed inventory of meaningful sounds, the phoneme inventory, by speakers of a language. Students will learn how to transcribe speech sounds using phonetic symbols (International Phonetic Alphabet or IPA). Students will learn how to identify phonemes and how to analyse and provide formal accounts of sound system processes across a range of languages, paying attention to segmental phonemes as well as to factors such as stress, tone and intonation. This course is essential for all linguistics students, and provides vital understandings for language teachers (English or otherwise), speech pathologists and students of disciplines such as psychology, anthropology and social inquiry.
Course learning outcomes
- Be able to describe the general physical mechanisms underlying the production and perception of speech.
- Be able to classify speech sounds according to vocal tract configuration, laryngeal activity and airflow.
- Be able to utilise the IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet) in both 'broad' and 'narrow' transcription of speech, and to work with other practical orthographies in speech transcription
- Be able to identify the role of stress, intonation, pitch and duration in the production and perception of speech
- Perform a phonemic analysis of any given language, drawing on notions of minimal pairs, contrastive vs complementary distribution, conditioning of allophones and free variation
- Identify the distinctive features of any given set of phonemes
- Explain the concept of 'underlying phonological form', drawing on examples from a variety of languages
- Formulate phonological and phonetic realisation rules, having regard to rule ordering principles
- Understand the basic principles of Phonological Typology
- Undertake comparisons of conventional vs non-linear approaches to phonological representation