80-782 Phonetics and Phonology I

12 units, Carnegie Mellon University

This course aims to provide students with practical tools for the study of speech sounds. The acoustic properties of sounds are examined using spectrograms and other devices, with emphasis on vowels and sonorant consonants. Following this, basic phonological notions are covered, tracing their development in the twentieth century up through optimality theory. In optimality theory, contrast and allophonic variation are explained in terms of an inputoutput device which selects the most harmonic candidate still faithful to phonemes in the input. The course should be relevant not only to linguistics students, but to students of language generally, with applications to sociolinguistics, child language development, speech recognition technologies, and the study of foreign languages.

Prerequisites: 80-180

Courseweave needs JavaScript to show sections, workloads and planning tools.