LING 260 - Speech Sound Analysis

Credits: (3)
College Curriculum: COLL 200
Domain (Anchored): CSI
Additional Domain (if applicable): NQR
This course connects the acoustic signal of speech sounds to sound patterns within different human languages. Students will learn to use freely-available phonetics software to examine, measure, and analyze human speech sounds. The acoustic differences between different speech sounds, such as what distinguishes consonants from vowels, will be introduced and explored. We’ll look at how both the length and the articulation of a sound can often be different in ways we’re not conscious of but that we can find, measure, and then quantify using statistical software that’s free through W&M. We’ll examine what influences people’s perceptions of sounds: that in some cases humans can perceive two very different sounds as the same and in other cases can perceive two very similar sounds as quite different. There are no prerequisites for this course.