This course has two main aims. Firstly, it teaches the nature of speech sounds, and how they are produced, transmitted acoustically, and perceived.  Secondly, students are shown how to work out the sounds of an unknown language from scratch. Students learn how to produce and transcribe a large number of the speech sounds of the world’s languages, and how to quantify some important speech acoustics with a computer. Each student chooses a language they know nothing about and works out its sounds with recordings from a native speaker. Students are also introduced to Forensic Speaker Identification, and the proper way of evaluating forensic evidence.

Lectures are supplemented by practical classes, involving the production and recognition of a wide variety of speech sounds from European and Asian languages.

Tape transcription assignments (30%), transcription test (15%), fieldwork transcription (10%), acoustics vowel/tone plot (8%), fieldwork project (27%) and in-class test (10%).

2 hours of lectures and one hour of tutorial per week

None but students are advised to take Introduction to the Study of Language LING1001/LING2001 first.

LING2010 Phonetics: Sounds of the World's Languages and LING1004/LING2004 Phonetics and Phonology

Ladefoged, P, A Course in Phonetics, 4th or later ed., Harcourt.

The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language, Chapters 22-30

This course or its predecessor LING1004/LING2004 is required for honours in Linguistics.