SLHS3304: Phonetics

What is a click sound? Why is it that people who learned to speak English in New York City are more likely to produce the words Mary, merry, and marry differently than people who learned English in Minneapolis? Why does the name 'Beto' produced by a native speaker of English sound so much like the word 'pero' produced by a native speaker of Spanish? How is English-accented Japanese different from Japanese produced by a native speaker? How does one write the sounds of speech using the international phonetic alphabet? Phonetics is the science of speech production. In this course in phonetics, you will develop skills in phonetic transcription, and you will apply those new skills to understanding differences across languages, speech development, dialects, and individual speech styles. By the end of the course, you will be a skilled phonetic transcriber, and you will have used those skills to understand aspects of speech that can't be understood without a knowledge of phonetics. Your new knowledge of the sound structure of human languages will make you a more flexible listener when you encounter new languages, or new varieties of languages you already know. The skills in this course will be taught with a variety of in-person and on-line tools, including lectures, small group work, on-line self-paced modules, and interactive transcription practice.

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