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| Course | Experimental Phonetics
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| Vakcode | TW85391
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| Credits | 5 ECTS
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| Entry requirements
| BA General Linguistics or something equivalent
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| Period | semester 1, block 2 (November - December 2011)
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| Information
| Onderwijssecretariaat Taal- en Letterkunde
also see IFA teaching
also see the page of the study guide
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| Part of...
| Research Master in Linguistics
Master in General Linguistics
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| Teacher |
Paul Boersma
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| Place | BH 302 (on 3 November: BH 101)
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| Time | Thursday 15:00-17:45 (exact days see below)
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| Objectives
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| You acquire theoretical skills to
turn a linguistic research question (phonology) into the design of an experiment on a corpus of recorded speech
(phonetics). You also acquire practical skills to perform such an experiment and report on it in an article.
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| Contents
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| Attention will be paid to the following steps:
- Acquiring and managing a speech corpus.
- Formulating a linguistically inspired research question (phonology: segments, phonemes,
discrete representations, the lexicon, arbitrary rules)
that could be answered by a speech corpus (phonetics: durations, spectra, pitches, silences, noises).
- Designing an experiment on a speech corpus (selection of tokens and speakers, selection of analysis methods).
- Collecting the data.
- Basic statistical techniques for finding effect sizes (confidence intervals of differences and correlations).
- Automating the procedures for data collection and analysis in a Praat script.
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| Format
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| Discussions and training sessions.
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| Study materials
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| The book Experimental Phonetics by Katrina Hayward
(available from the teacher during the first lecture), plus material distributed by the teacher.
Also the latest version of the Praat program.
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| Cost
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| €65 for the book.
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| Language
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| English
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Home assignments, questions about read material during the lectures, several small written examinations.
Each of the seven lectures lasts 2.5 hours (plus break).
Your homework may cost you about 11 hours a week (book: 40 pages = 5 hours; plus 3 assignments of two hours each);
this is also true of the homework you receive in the last week, on which the final test (in week 16) will be based.
This course will therefore cost you about 13.5 hours a week (a third of your time),
which makes a total of approximately 105 hours, at least if you succeed on the first try.
Lecture 1
3 Nov. |
Kennismaking
About how to fill any gaps in your knowledge of speech perception, speech production, transcription.
Homework 1: read chapter 1, and make the assignments on it.
Techniques: corpora, software, research question, the mean
First we introduce a corpus and the analysis software.
Then we introduce our first example research question
(are there duration differences between the Dutch vowels /a:-I-i/?).
Finally a statistical technique: computing the mean in four ways
(by eye, by hand, with the Calculator, with a Praat script).
Homework 2: extract the tokens by hand for the eight speakers of the IFA corpus,
and compute the three average durations of /a:-I-i/, each in a different way.
Technique: standard deviation
Another statistical technique: compute the standard deviation in three ways
(by hand, with the Calculator, with a Praat script).
Homework 3: compute the three standard deviations of the durations of /a:-I-i/, each in a different way. |
Lecture 2
10 Nov. |
Book: introduction
Discussion and grading of chapter 1 and homework 1.
Homework 4: read chapter 2 (sound waves and spectra), and make the assignments on it.
Technique: sign test
First a discussion of homework 2 and 3.
Then a statistical technique: factoring out much of the variation between speakers:
a test nearly by eye (sign test on paired data);
computation of its statistical significance with binomialQ
(with the Calculator and with a Praat script).
Homework 5: compute whether /i/ is reliably longer than /I/,
and whether /a:/ is reliably longer than /i/, each in a different way.
Technique: the size of a difference
Then a statistical technique: to report how big a difference between two things is,
we compute the frequentist confidence interval of this difference with invStudentQ
(with the Calculator and with a Praat script);
if this interval does not include zero, we have found a reliable difference (Student's t-test on paired data).
Homework 6: compute how much longer /i/ could be than /I/,
and how much longer /a:/ could be than /i/, each in a different way. |
Lecture 3
17 Nov. |
Book: sound waves and spectra
Discussion and grading of chapter 2 and homework 4.
Homework 7: read chapters 3 (digital recording and spectrography) and 4 (sources and filters), and make the assignments on them.
Technique: reproducibility of your experiment
First a discussion of homework 5 and 6.
Then a new method for automating the analysis of the experiment: annotate corpus data with TextGrids in Praat.
Homework 8: mark the beginnings and endings of the /a:-I-i/ vowels in Praat
(both replications),
then write a Praat script to extract the results as a table.
Technique: tables
Homework 9: from the vowel duration experiment you have a headered table of data
that can be queried for statistics by hand in SPSS, Excel, or Praat.
Read it into Praat and retrieve the statistics (mean, standard deviation, sign test, t-test, confidence interval). |
Lecture 4
24 Nov. |
Book: digital recording, spectrography, sources and filters
Discussion and grading of chapter 3 and 4 and homework 7.
Homework 10: read chapter 5 (perception models and inner ear), and make the assignments on it.
These include two paper-like (15-line) assignments (very important) on your ideas on these models.
Technique: programming and t-test
First a discussion of homework 8 and 9.
Homework 11: how to write Praat scripts: automate the t-test.
Techniques: programming, and graphical display of data
A graphical technique: plotting vowel spaces in Praat.
Homework 12: measure the vowel space of one speaker of the IFA-corpus by hand,
and use Praat's history mechanism to draw it. |
Lecture 5
1 Dec. |
Book: perception models and inner ear
Discussion and grading of chapter 5 and homework 10.
Homework 13: read chapter 6 (formants), and make the assignments on it.
Technique: automated formant analysis
First a discussion of homework 11 and 12.
Then we introduce our second example linguistically-informed research question
(are the auditory heights of front and back vowels correlated?)
Homework 14: measure the vowel spaces of all eight speakers of the IFA-corpus by adapting
your existing Praat script.
Technique: programming and pooling
Homework 15: compute the average F1 and F2 of all vowels for the male and female groups separately. |
Lecture 6
8 Dec. |
Book: formants
Discussion and grading of chapter 6 and homework 13.
Homework 16: read chapter 7 (perception models), and make the assignments on it.
Homework 17: read chapter 8.1 through 8.3.3 (phonation, larynx, articulation), and make the assignments on it.
Technique: correlations
First a discussion of homework 14 and 15.
Then a statistical technique: the Dutch long mid vowels vary appreciably between speakers;
does the F1 curve for the front vowel correlate with that of the back vowel,
i.e. is the degree of diphthongization in [e:]/[ei]
correlated with that of the same speaker's [o:]/[ou]?
Then we introduce our third example research question (the relation between F0 and F1).
Homework 18: programming and correlations. |
Lecture 7
15 Dec. |
Book: consonants
Discussion and grading of chapters 7 through 8.3.3 and homework 16 and 17.
Homework 19: read chapter 8.3.4 through 8.6 (articulation, production models), and make the assignments on it.
Techniques
Discussion of homework 18.
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| 22 Dec.? |
Open-book test on chapter 8 and earlier chapters.
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