Topics in linguistic theory: laboratory phonology

Lectures: 1 session / week, 3 hours / session

The goal of this course is to prepare you to engage in experimental investigations of questions related to linguistic theory, focusing on phonetics and phonology. The course will be organized around four main topics (subject to revision):

In the process of investigating these topics, we will cover some phonological theory, the basics of speech acoustics, acoustic analysis, speech perception, and experimental design. Students will develop and execute their own experimental projects during the course.

4 subjects in linguistics

Cross-linguistic generalizations about the nature of inventories of vowel contrasts. How can we explain these generalizations? Lindblom's Theory of Adaptive Dispersion.

Investigating the hypothesis that phonological contrasts preferentially appear in contexts where there are better perceptual cues to those contrasts (Steriade's 'licensing by cue').

One of the ways in which intonation affects meaning is via its role in marking focused constituents. How does this marking work?

A number of non-phonological factors have been shown to affect the phonetic realization of words, e.g. word frequency, lexical neighborhood density and contextual predictability. What is the nature of these effects? How do they interact with each other? Are they a consequence of 'listener-oriented' behavior?

A. Readings and class discussions

B. Assignments - approximately one per week

C. Final project

This is a 'communication intensive' course, so written work and presentations will be important.

A draft of the final project will have to be submitted in time for you to revise it in light of my comments.

Johnson, Keith. Acoustic and Auditory Phonetics. 2nd ed. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2003. ISBN: 9781405101233.

Please see readings for additional texts.

Introduction

Laboratory phonology

Basic audition

Digital signal processing

Source-filter theory

Acoustics of vowels

Spectral analysis

Licensing by cue

Basic statistics

Effects of the lexicon and context on speech perception

Draft of final project due

Final version due 10 days after Ses #12

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