Ling 600.01 Phonetic Theory, Au 2011

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, including the basics of the Acoustic Theory of Speech Production, related theories of speech perception, and some ideas from Autosegmental-Metrical Phonology about how to represent the relationship between prosodic structure and the realization of vowels and consonants. One major component of the coursework is a set of take-home 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 major 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 serves to cover 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 Speech & Hearing 320 or Linguistics 500.

Administration

• Mary E. Beckman, room 021 Oxley, 292-9752 ext. 2, mbeckman at ling dot osu dot edu
  Office hours: Wednesdays at 2:30 and by appointment
• Tsz-Him Tsui, room 200 Oxley, 247-2698, tsui at ling dot osu dot edu
  Office hours: Tuesdays at 1:30 and by appointment

Syllabus

A full and detailed syllabus is available here in pdf format along with a time table that will reflect any changes we make to due dates to accommodate the actual pace of the class. You should refer to this time table from the last page of the syllabus for due dates for assignments associated with the topics that we will cover in the following sequence:

1. (Weeks 0 & 1) -- Introduction to sound and "sounds" (issues of discretization and segmentation). Types of acoustic signals, and the alternation of major class features.
2. (Week 2) -- The resonating vocal tract and the overtones in schwa (calculating resonance frequencies of a simple tube).
3. (Weeks 2 & 3) -- The voice source (periodicity and pitch). Basics of signal analysis.
4. (Weeks 3 & 4) -- The vowel space.
5. (Weeks 4 & 5) -- Psychoacoustics of timbre.
6. (Week 6) -- Assessing perceptual categories and measuring perceptual distance.
7. (Week 7) -- Acoustics of fricatives. Quantal theory and fricative inventories.
8. (Weeks 8 & 9) -- Acoustics of plosive consonants. Phonation type contrasts on obstruents. Positional effects.
9. (Week 10) -- 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 we 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 (or will be) linked into this page as part of the next set of materials.
2. Phonetic Theory -- Course Project and Lab Assignments. 2011 edition, online course materials.
   This set is all of the other documents that are (or will be) linked into this course web page. These 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 a section with suggestions about how to find a language consultant. You should consult this section immediately.
3. Acoustic and Auditory Phonetics. 3rd edition. By Keith Johnson (2011, Blackwell). This is a textbook on sale at the main campus bookstore and other similar outlets. (Be sure to get the 3rd edition, which has a substantially changed section 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, we 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

As noted above, 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. (Note that the day on which the lab is scheduled to be done in class is stated as the first or second class period in some week of the quarter, and we're starting the count of weeks at "week 0" for the class meeting on Thursday, September 22.)

• Lab 1 -- Basic acoustics
• Lab 2 -- Estimating the length of the vocal tract
• Lab 3 -- Calculating fundamental frequency
• 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, 6.9, and 6.10 in Johnson (2011).
• 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).
• 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.
• If you want to take advantage of Emu to organize your files and transcriptions, you can download the code from here. Jonathan Harrington's book Phonetic Analysis of Speech Corpora is a good introduction to using Emu and R to analyze speech files that you have annotated using Praat.
• 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.
• 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.
• Here's the link to Richard Ishida's IPA font-picker page.
• 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.
• Here is a link to Jim Hillenbrand's Detroiter vowel data.
• 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, 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.