The lexicon and its features

Lectures: 1 session / week, 3 hours / session

Instructor approval.

Background material in phonology and possibly phonetics and psycholinguistics of lexical access will be presented for those who are interested (especially students lacking a background in these fields) in separate sessions to precede the relevant lectures.

All students enrolled in the course are required to:

We encourage inter-disciplinary teams of students doing joint work. We will set aside some time early in the term to discuss with the class the logistics of such collaboration.

Please see readings.

This course is taught by five instructors, each of which is responsible for certain lecture sessions, as shown in the calendar below. Please consult the following key for instructors' names:

EF = Edward Flemming
DG = David Gow
SS = Stefanie Shattuck-Hufnagel
DS = Donca Steriade
KS = Ken Stevens

a. Distinctive features; phonological evidence and evidence from production, acoustics and perception; articulator-free features and articular-bound features

b. Basics of acoustics of speech production: acoustic sources from airflow, filtering of sources by the vocal tract

c. Some basic anatomy: breathing, lungs, larynx, oral tract, nasal cavities

d. Basics of hearing; hearing for speech

e. Air flow and its control in speech production

f. Introduction to quantal theory, enhancement

a. Vowel systems, relation between acoustics and articulation; Vowel nasalization, glottal source for vowels

b. Waveform displays, spectrum displays, spectrograms

c. Sonorant consonants; Glides, liquids, nasals

a. Learning phonology with distinctive features

b. Inferring features

c. Natural classes

a. Experimental evidence for underspecification

b. Evidence for underspecification in lexical access vs. phonological evidence

a. Syllable structure

b. Contrast as an alternative theory of features

a. Objects of speech perception

b. Models of speech perception - relation to lexical access, the role of 'intermediate' representations, Nearey's typology of intermediate representations

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