LING215-12S1 (C) Semester One 2012

Articulatory and Acoustic Phonetics

15 points

Details:
Start Date: Monday, 20 February 2012
End Date: Sunday, 24 June 2012
Withdrawal Dates
Last Day to withdraw from this course:
  • Without financial penalty (full fee refund): Friday, 2 March 2012
  • Without academic penalty (including no fee refund): Friday, 18 May 2012

Description

This course introduces students to the study of speech sounds in human languages. The articulatory phonetics section will aim to develop students' skills in recognising and producing a range of sounds, using the International Phonetic Alphabet. There will also be sections on acoustic phonetics and suprasegmental features such as pitch and voice quality. Students will be expected to conduct acoustic analyses of speech sounds.

We are linguistic animals and we communicate primarily using sound.  Speech is our most common form of communication; speech plays a huge role in our everyday lives.   This course is about understanding speech.  In the first part of the course, we think carefully about how we produce sound, how the various muscles we use combine in order to create different sounds and how these sounds combine in turn to form speech (i.e. articulatory phonetics).  When we produce speech, we make changes to the air molecules around us (this is what we ‘hear’) and so in tandem with exploring speech articulation, on this course we will also learn about how we can measure and interpret changes in the air caused by speech (i.e. acoustic phonetics).  Because speech plays such a large part in our lives, it is difficult to discuss the properties of speech in isolation and so in the second part of this course, we explore connections between phonetics and other areas of linguistics.  Finally, we look at how an understanding of phonetics can impact on real world events

Prerequisites

LING101 or LING111 or ENGL123 or ENGL112

Restrictions

Course Coordinator

Lynn Clark

Assessment

Assessment Due Date Percentage 
Group Presentation 15%
Essay/assignment 30%
Class test 15%
Final exam 40%

Textbooks / Resources

Recommended Reading

Peter Ladefoged and Keith Johnson; A Course in Phonetics ; 6th edition; Boston, Thomson/Wadsworth, 2010.

Indicative Fees

Domestic fee $619.00

International fee $2,688.00

* All fees are inclusive of NZ GST or any equivalent overseas tax, and do not include any programme level discount or additional course-related expenses.

For further information see School of Languages and Cultures .

All LING215 Occurrences

  • LING215-12S1 (C) Semester One 2012