Course description: This is an introductory course on the quantitative analytical tools that are used in the phonetic sciences, the study of human speech.  Speech is a very complex behavior.  Saying even a simple sentence such as Luce hit another home run. takes more motor coordination than actually hitting the home run.  Yet we are not surprised when we talk with a child as young as three or four who can say a sentence like this very naturally and intelligibly.  Understanding speech also is a very complex skill.  We take it for granted that we can listen to this sentence and correctly identify the first word as Luce rather than as Ruth and the second word as hit rather than as heat.  Yet speakers of some other languages besides English have a great deal of difficulty distinguishing these two pairs of words.  How can we describe the similarities between the consonants in Luce versus Ruth or between the vowels in hit versus heat that make these two word pairs difficult for speakers of some other languages?  Can we analyze speakers’ behavior in saying words and sentences, and listeners’ behavior in listening to them, well enough to be able to construct models that predict which sounds will be difficult for children acquiring their first language or for adults acquiring a second language?  In this course, we will introduce pertinent ideas and results from research in the various disciplines that have contributed to our understanding of the sounds of languages.  We will introduce some of useful statistical tools that are used in the phonetic sciences, and do several experiments in class, to give a flavor of the diverse research methods that speech scientists have developed to try to determine how speech is produced and perceived by humans.  We will also take a brief look at how speech engineers have applied this knowledge to develop computer speech automatic synthesis systems. 

Course objectives: Participation in this course should lead to:

1.     an understanding of the general character of speech sounds, and of how they are produced and perceived,

2.     a familiarity with some of the measurements and models that are used to study speech sounds,

3.     an understanding of some basic concepts in probability theory and statistics, and

4.     an appreciation of how probability theory and statistics can be applied to modeling speech. 

Textbooks:

•          Peter Ladefoged (2004). Vowels and Consonants: An Introduction to the Sounds of Languages.  2^nd Edition.  Blackwell.  ISBN 1-4051-2459-8  [Note: the sound files on the CD that accompanies this book are also available at http://hctv.humnet.ucla.edu/departments/linguistics/VowelsAndConsonants.]