Ling 600.01 Phonetic Theory, Au 2008

Contents

• Description
• Administration
• Syllabus
• Textbooks
• Course project reports
• In-class lab assignments
• Instructions for take-home lab exercises
• Useful links

Description

This course is a graduate-level introduction to phonetics. It is an overview of phonetic representations and theories, starting from the basics of the acoustic theory of speech production and extending through recent accounts of prosodic structure and its relationship to the realization of vowels and consonants. A major component of the coursework is a set of exercises, with data gathering and/or analysis outside of the classroom and an associated in-class lab assignment. This component is intended to fulfill the main function of the course, which is to provide the background for further work in phonetics and laboratory phonology. A second component is a small field project, with incremental field project reports geared to the topics covered in the class. Most of the field project reports also have one or two associated in-class lab assignments using data recorded in collaboration with the field project language consultant, so that this component of the coursework relates the phonetic theories and representations reviewed in class to the classical phonological model of distinctive features and allophonic variation embodied in the International Phonetic Alphabet. Thus, this component covers some of the background for courses in field methods and phonological theory by providing the opportunity to exercise transcription skills in conjunction with other methods of observation in working with a language consultant. However, this coverage assumes a basic familiarity with the IPA model and its relationship to subsequent phonological theory. A student who wants a more thorough, basic introduction to classical phonemics and the IPA should enroll instead in Linguistics 500.

Administration

Syllabus

A full and detailed syllabus is available here in pdf format. You should refer to this time table from the last page of the syllable for due dates for assignments associated with the topics that we will cover in the following sequence:

1. (Weeks 1 & 2) — Introduction to sound and "sounds" (issues of discretization and segmentation). Types of acoustic signals, and the alternation of major class features.
2. (Week 3) — discretization and segmentation). Some basics of signal analysis. The voice source (periodicity and pitch).
3. (Weeks 4 & 5) — The vowel space. Acoustic theory of speech production. Calculating resonance frequencies of a simple tube. LPC analysis. Psychoacoustics of timbre.
4. (Week 6) — Acoustics of fricatives. Quantal theory and fricative inventories.
5. (Weeks 7 & 8) — Assessing perceptual categories and measuring perceptual distance.
6. (Week 9) — Acoustics of plosive consonants.
7. (Week 10) — Phonation type contrasts on obstruents. Positional effects.
8. (Week 11) — Constrictions coupled in parallel and in series. The acoustics of nasals and laterals and of various types of "secondary" articulation.

Textbooks

There are three sets of materials associated with this course.

1. A Laboratory Course in Phonology. By Mary E. Beckman and Janet B. Pierrehumbert. Blackwell (to appear).
   This set consists of extracts from a textbook that is in preparation, including recordings and other copyrighted material, which will be made available incrementally on a hidden web site, which I can reveal to you when you have agreed to certain conditions on use which are designed to protect the privacy of the talkers who contributed the materials. There are also instructions specific to this course that are linked into this page as part of the next set of materials.
2. Phonetic Theory — Course Project and Lab Assignments. 2006 edition, online course materials.
   This set is all of the other documents that are linked into this course web page which describe the field project reports that are due at various stages of the fieldwork, provide instructions for the take-home lab exercises , and specify the materials to prepare for the in-class lab assignments associated with the course project reports and take-home. There is also a document that gives more general instructions for the course project and in-class labs. This document includes the IPA chart and useful hints for working with a language consultant, as well as suggestions about how to find a language consultant. You should consult this section immediately.
3. Acoustic and Auditory Phonetics. 2nd edition. By Keith Johnson (2003, Blackwell). This is a textbook on sale at the main campus bookstore and other similar outlets. (Be sure to get the 2nd edition, which has substantial added sections on perception which we will be use in this class.) The background reading that is assigned for each topic is from this book, and it must be done before the beginning of the class in which we begin a topic so that you can ask questions about any passage you do not understand. If you do not ask questions, I will assume that you understand the concepts in the book well enough to apply them in doing the labs, take-home exercises, and field project report.

General information about course project and in-class labs

A general description of the course project and lab assignments is available here. This pdf document also includes the IPA chart and a useful list of words to start with in eliciting forms from your language consultant. Read this document before the first in-class lab session, in order to know how to prepare.

Instructions for in-class lab assignments

Here are links to descriptions of the materials and questions for the ten in-class lab assignments. And here is a link to the list of Field Project Languages that we will be covering in Labs 2, 5, etc.

• Lab 1 -- Basic acoustics
• Lab 2 -- Calculating fundamental frequency
• Lab 3 -- Estimating the length of the vocal tract
• Lab 4 -- Measuring formants in English vowels
• Lab 5 -- Vowels of the field project language
• Lab 6 -- Judging perceptual distances
• Lab 7 -- Fricatives of the field project language
• Lab 8 -- Plosives of the field project language
• Lab 9 -- Phonation type contrasts in the field project language
• Lab 10 -- Nasals, laterals, etc., in the field project language

Descriptions of the field project reports

Here are links to the instructions for the five field project reports.

• Field Project Report 1 "The language and language consultant"
• Field Project Report 2 "Typical word shapes in the language"
• Field Project Report 3 "The vowel space"
  Here is a script file containing R code for plotting vowels in both hertz and ERB space illustrated using the values for the Mazatec vowels in Figures 6.8 and 6.9 in Johnson (2003).
• Field Project Report 4 "Preliminary list of obstruents"
• Field Project Report 5 "Complete consonant chart"

Specific instructions for the take-home lab exercises

(If there is no title or document at the link, that means that the exercise is still in preparation. If there is a title and link, but the date at the top of the document is 2006, that means that the instructions for that exercise have not been updated yet for the 2007 edition, and you should not use the instructions yet.)

• Exercise 1 -- "Major class features" (a segmentation exercise)
• Exercise 2 -- "Rugao tone patterns" (an exercise on the semantics of tone and the syntax of tonal groups)
• Exercise 3 -- "Method of Adjustment" (an exercise on the perceptual vowel space).
  A directory containing the Table files of results from the experiment in class and figures showing various composit views.
• Exercise 4 -- "MDS on Mandarin voiceless fricatives"
  A directory containing the experimental stimuli, the Table files of results from the experiment in class, and various figures and scripts.
• Exercise 5 -- "Korean stops" (an exercise on various acoustic cues to plosive phonation type contrasts).

Useful links

• You can download Praat off the Web. Here is a link to the praat scripts that we write in class together.
• Here is the homepage to go to in order to get R, the "GNU S" software package for statistical analysis and graphics. Here is a link to the R scripts that we write in class together.
• You can download WaveSurfer off the web, too. WaveSurfer is based on snack, the "sound toolkit" that is now incorporated as a standard package within tcl/tk, which you can download from several places, including the ActiveState ActiveTcl page. (On this page, click on the link for Get Active Tcl under the little drawing of the frog in the blue window, and proceed from there.) You will need tcl/tk if you decide to set up your computer to run the "Method of Adjustment" experiment for Exercise 2 at home.
• Here is a link to the tcl/tk code for the Method of Adjustment paradigm that we will use in one of the take-home lab exercises.
• Sound files and video clips that accompany the late Peter Ladefoged's books Vowels and Consonants and A Course in Phonetics are available at the UCLA Phonetics Lab Archive.
• Sound files and various demos for Phil Hoole's Einfuehrung in die Phonetik I und II are linked into this part of his courses web page.
• The home page for the International Phonetic Association also has a good deal of useful material, including an archive of recordings that go with the "language illustrations" in the Handbook of the International Phonetic Association.
• If you're looking to embed IPA fonts in an html document, check out John Well's page on the IPA in Unicode.
• If you're looking for a way to include IPA fonts in a LaTeX document, you can use the tipa font. Here is a link to Matt Makashay's cheat sheet on the textipa font, described in this how-to file.
• If you want to label audio files for your field project report in the IPA but don't want to bother with the issues of how to embed an IPA font into a TextGrid file, you might want to look at the coventions for "transliterating" IPA symbols into the ASCII symbol described on the SAMPA home page. Alternatively, you might want to use WorldBet, which is what we are using to transcribe the children and adults participants in the paidologos project -- a cross-language study of phonological acquisition.
• Here is a link to the UCLA Phonetics Lab Software web page, where you can download the UPSID-PC database program, if you're interested in looking at the range of phoneme inventories that were described for the 451 languages in Ian Maddison's UPSID database in 1990. And here is a link to Jeff Mielke's P-base database of sound patterns.
• The home page for the ToBI framework for developing prosodic annotation tools links you to descriptions of prosodic systems for various languages, including Korean, Japanese (for which, see also the X-JToBI conventions that extend the system to phenomena observed in spontaneous speech by researchers working on the Corpus of Spontaneous Japanese), Mandarin Chinese, Cantonese, Greek, German, and English.
• If you want to make recordings in the sound booth in Oxley room 06, talk with the instructor.