Field Phonetics

Matt Gordon

Spike Gildea

http://infield.faculty.linguistics.ucsb.edu/courses/phonetics.html

June 30 - July 2, 3:15 p.m. - 5:00 p.m.
Life Science Computing Facility

Instructors

Matthew Gordon
University of California, Santa Barbara

Spike Gildea
University of Oregon

Course Overview

This workshop will provide a basic overview of how phonetics can be used to enhance the linguistic fieldwork experience. Emphasis will be on the use of collecting phonetic data as an aid to impressionistic transcription in the development of phonological and phonetic descriptions and analyses. Participants are encouraged to bring their own recordings collected in the field as we plan to devote substantial time to the discussion of issues encountered by the participants in their own research. The workshop will comprise three session whose content will roughly be as follows:

Day 1: We will briefly cover issues of microphone placement and recording equipment, then record a session in which we do basic elicitation with one or two speakers. This will give us a chance to test our ears with unknown words in isolation and in carrier phrases. Next, we will walk everyone through the steps of getting our recordings segmented into WAV file format so we can analyze them acoustically.

Day 2: The class will split into two separate computer labs, beginners with Gildea and more advanced students with Gordon. We will use Praat, a freeware acoustic analysis program, to analyze our in-class recordings and/or recordings that students bring from their own prior field research.

Day 3: Discussion of the impact of acoustic analysis on our initial transcriptions. Then we will brainstorm about other ways we can utilize laboratory techniques in the field, e.g. creating stimuli for collecting prosodic data, doing field palatograms, etc.