LSA 317: EXPERIMENTAL PHONOLOGY

Tuesdays and Fridays 1:30-3:30 pm.

John Ohala <ohala@berkeley.edu>
Professor Emeritus, University of California, Berkeley
PhD, UCLA, 1968

Keith Johnson <keithjohnson@berkeley.edu>
Professor, University of California, Berkeley
PhD, Ohio State University, 1988

In this course we will guide students through a set of five experiments. These hands-on experiments are "greatest hits" in our introductory phonetics and laboratory phonology courses and provide students with hands on experiences with speech production and perception, and will color their view of language sound systems forever. The major part of the course will consist of case studies and some training in the methods of the experimental approach to phonology. This will involve a brief review of speech articulation, acoustics, and perception and an introduction to some of classic experimental methods as they apply to phonological questions. The course will have relevance to both the theory and practice of phonology. What phonologists claim or believe may be valid or not. Until the claims are rigorously tested, they remain just a collection of assumptions or guesses. Experiments constitute a formal trial where competing claims - one of which may be the 'null hypothesis' - can be evaluated on the basis of evidence which is gathered in a way that is free from the bias or influence of the experimenter and can be replicated by others. The history of experimental phonology goes back more than a century to Meringer and Meyer, Rousselot, Sapir, and many others. Teaching experimental phonology involves both philosophy or attitude and practical methodology. The basic philosophical element is DOUBT. The hands-on experiments that we guide students through in this course will fuel their thinking about phonology and shape their approach to both phonetic and phonological theory.

Course requirement. To earn credit in this course students must submit a 'course notebook' by the end of class on July 27. This notebook should be in the form of a dairy in which you write notes on the assigned reading material, notes taken during the class meetings, reactions to the assigned exercises, and general reactions to the course. This may, if you wish, be in the form of a web log. In which case you only need to tell the instructors the address of the blog. If you keep a hand-written course notebook please write legibly and be sure to include your address so we can mail it back to you after the grades are assigned. We're using this notebook to evaluate how much you got out of the course and how deeply you engaged with the material being covered.

Friday, July 6: Philosophical preliminaries; brief history of experimental phonology. This lecture reviews the history and main philosophical underpinnings of an experimental approach to phonology.

Ohala, J. J. & Jaeger, J. J. (1986) Introduction. In J. J. Ohala & J. J. Jaeger (eds.), Experimental phonology. Orlando, FL: Academic Press. 1-12.

Ohala, J. J. (1986) Consumer's guide to evidence in phonology. Phonology Yearbook 3.3-26.

Ohala, J. J. (1987) Experimental phonology. Proc. Ann. Meeting, Berkeley Ling. Soc. 13.207-222.

Ohala, J. J. (1995) Experimental phonology. In John A. Goldsmith (ed.), A Handbook of Phonological Theory. Oxford: Blackwell. 713-722.

Tuesday, July 10: Methods in experimental phonology. In this hands-on training session students learn to download the software that will be used in the course, use the software to record acoustic and physiological signals (we will bring the necessary equipment), and analyze and present results in a freely downloadable statistics/graphics package.

Ladefoged, P.L. (2003) Phonetic Data Analysis: An Introduction to Fieldwork and Instrumental Techniques. Cambridge: Blackwell.

Wavesurfer A great tool for acoustic and articulatory signal analysis.

Praat Another great tool for phonetic research – particularly speech synthesis.

R Statistical package This free package is useful for data analysis and graphing.

Using Wavesurfer - a brief introduction. Sound files to go with "Using Wavesurfer".

Friday, July 13. Acoustic/perceptual cues - the 'damp skunk' exercise. This exercise illustrates the notion of acoustic cues by the use of simple waveform editing in which the student discovers the surprising diversity of cues for voicing and place of articulation contrasts in English.

Chang, S., Plauché, M. C., & Ohala, J. J. (2001) Markedness and consonant confusion asymmetries. In E. Hume & K. Johnson (eds.), The role of speech perception in phonology. San Diego CA: Academic Press. 79-101.

Wright, R. (2001) Perceptual cues in contrast maintenance. In E. Hume & K. Johnson (eds.), The role of speech perception in phonology. San Diego CA: Academic Press. 251-277.

How to cut up a damp skunk - the exercise.

"damp skunk" A waveform file to play with.

Tuesday, July 17. Coarticulation - prosodic conditioning of vowel nasalization. With this exercise students learn to record and interpret nasal airflow data. Students discover that vowel nasalization is gradient, speaker-specific, and prosodically conditioned.

Farnetani, E. (1997) Coarticulation and connected speech processes. W.J. Hardcastle & J. Laver (eds) Handbook of Phonetic Sciences. Oxford: Blackwell. pp 371-404.

Fowler, C. A. and E. Saltzman (1993) Coordination and coarticulation in speech production. Language and Speech 36, 171-195.

Krakow, R.A. and Huffman, M.K. (1993) Instruments and techniques for investigating nasalization and velopharyngeal function in the laboratory: An introduction. In Huffman, M.K. and Krakow, R.A. (eds) Nasals, Nasalization, and the Velum. San Diego: Academic Press (pp 3-59).

Liu, H, Warren D.W., & Dalston R.M. (1991) Increased nasal resististance induced by the pressure-flow technique and its effect on pressure and air flow during speech. Cleft Palate-Craniofacial Journal 28 (3): 261-262.

Öhman, S. E. G. (1965) Coarticulation in VCV utterances: spectrographic measurements. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 39, 151-168.

Pelorson X (2001) On the meaning and accuracy of the pressure-flow technique to determine constriction areas within the vocal tract. Speech Communication 35 (3-4): 179-190.

Warren, D.W. & Dubois, A.B. (1964) A pressure-flow technique for measuring velopharyngeal orifice area during continuous speech. Cleft Palate Journal 1, 52-71.

Whalen, D. H. (1990) Coarticulation is largely planned. Journal of Phonetics 18, 3-35.

Friday, July 20. The voice - Laryngeal features and their correlates. Examining electroglottographic and acoustic signals, students discover key points of the acoustic theory of speech production in this exercise. Key concepts here, building on the results of the 'damp skunk' exercise, are the multiplicity of phonetic cues for phonological contrast and the variability of these cues over differing linguistic contexts and across talkers.

Childers, D.G. & Lee, C.K. (1991) Vocal quality factors: Analysis, synthesis, and perception. J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 90(5): 2394-2410.

Ní Chasaide, A. & Gobl, C. (1997) Voice Source Variation. W.J. Hardcastle & J. Laver (eds) Handbook of Phonetic Sciences. Oxford: Blackwell. pp 427-461.

Ohala, J. J. (1978) The production of tone. In: V. A. Fromkin (ed.), Tone: a linguistic survey. New York: Academic Press. 5 - 39.

Tuesday, July 24. The listener as a source of sound change - cue trading in speech perception. Students implement and conduct a small speech perception experiment in which they discover how acoustic cues trade off against each other in speech perception. Surprisingly they discover that members of the class utilize cues differently, partly on the basis of native language experience.

Best, C. T., Morrongiello, B. A., and Robson, R. C. (1981) Perceptual equivalence of acoustic cues in speech and nonspeech perception, Percept. Psychophys. 29, 191 - 211.

Fitch, H., Halwes, T., Erickson, D., and Liberman, A. (1980) Perceptual equivalence of two acoustic cues for stop-consonant manner, Percept. Psychophys. 27, 343 - 350.

Ohala, J. J. (1981) The listener as a source of sound change. In: C. S. Masek, R. A. Hendrick, & M. F. Miller (eds.), Papers from the Parasession on Language and Behavior. Chicago: Chicago Ling. Soc. 178 - 203.

Friday, July 27. Prosody in speech synthesis. In this exercise students study pitch traces and rhythmic patterns of speech produced by a commercial speech synthesizer and a volunteer speaker, in an attempt to discover rule governed prosodic systems. They discover that natural sounding prosody requires sophisticated pragmatic knowledge and an element of (apparent) randomness.

M. Anderson, J. Pierrehumbert, and M. Liberman, (1984) Synthesis by rule of English intonation patterns, ICASSP, pp. 281--284.

Liberman, M. and J. Pierrehumbert (1984). Intonational invariance under changes in pitch range and length. In M. Aronoff and R. Oehrle (Eds.), Language Sound Structure, pp. 157--233. Cambridge, MA: M.I.T. Press.

Friday, July 27. Summing up. Stepping back from the details of these experimental explorations of language sound systems, the final session explores the outlines of phonological description that are consistent with the key observations made in the course.