Overview
The study of speech sounds is essential to industries such as: speech recognition and AI; forensic linguistics; speech pathology; education; and more. This unit begins by exploring how the wide variety of sounds of spoken languages around the world are produced in the vocal tract, and how linguists transcribe these … For more content click the Read More button below.
We then investigate how speech sounds are organised in the mind and are used to convey meaning. Sounds will change depending on where they appear, and this is critical for comprehending and producing speech, as well as processing written forms for reading and spelling (e.g. English ‘p’ is pronounced very differently at the start and the end a word).
You may then select from a range of focused modules to apply this foundational knowledge to particular contexts, including: the justice system (forensic phonetics); AI and speech recognition (computational linguistics); child language acquisition (psycholinguistics); language change (historical linguistics); the different sounds of Englishes around the world (world Englishes); race, gender and implicit bias (sociophonetics).
Offerings
S1-01-CLAYTON-ON-CAMPUS
Rules
Enrolment Rule
Contacts
Chief Examiner(s)
Associate Professor Alice Gaby
Unit Coordinator(s)
Dr Isabelle Burke
Learning outcomes
On successful completion of this unit, you should be able to:
1.
Identify how speech sounds are produced in spoken languages around the world
2.
Recognise how speech sounds are represented using the International Phonetic Alphabet;
3.
Explore the ways in which the speech sounds of a language vary across time and space or between users;
4.
Apply phonetic and phonological insights to practical problems in areas such as forensics, computational linguistics and sociophonetics.
Teaching approach
Active learning
Assessment summary
Within semester assessment: 100%
Assessment
1 - Quiz/Quizzes
2 - Presentation
3 - Essay
4 - Exercise/s
Scheduled and non-scheduled teaching activities
Lectures
Tutorials
Workload requirements
Workload
Learning resources
Required resources
Availability in areas of study
Linguistics and English Language