This course is an introduction to phonetics, the study of speech
sounds. In this course, the basics of speech production (articulatory
phonetics) and speech acoustics (acoustic phonetics) will be covered.
This course will also help students to develop some basic skills for
investigating linguistic behavior expressed in the form of speech
sound. The students will learn how to transcribe speech sounds by
using the IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet), and how to analyze &
manipulate speech sounds by using the speech software PRAAT. Although
many examples will be drawn from English, the aim is to help the
students to deal with speech sounds from diverse languages. At the
later part of the semester, we will discuss applications of phonetics
in other areas of linguistics, e.g., second language acquisition. We
hope that the students learn to describe and analyze speech sounds of
the world in a relatively objective manner. We also hope that the
skills acquired in this course can help them to pursue their
linguistic investigation in the future.