The Science of Speech Sounds

Catalog description

The course, formerly called Phonetics, will prepare students to focus on the most basic units of speech – the sounds. They will use the international code adopted by speech professionals and linguists to transcribe speech, which will be supported by information on locations of articulatory contacts and air-channeling ways. This kind of analysis helps students to precisely perceive and describe speech sounds—an important skill required to make sense of the logic behind speech differences. Dialectal variations, speech of multilingual speakers, individual differences, communication accommodation, and speech disorders will be discussed via journal articles from an interdisciplinary perspective. The larger aim of the course is that through increasing their speech perception and description skills, the course will raise students’ awareness of speech differences, which will positively influence their interactions with individuals speaking differently from them.