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Unit Outline

This unit provides a brief introduction to some key topics in speech science. The unit is divided into two parts, each worth 50% of the unit assessment. The two parts are:-

Part A. Phonetics and Phonology

The aim of this part of the course is to provide students with an introduction to the fields of phonetics and phonology. At the successful completion of this section of the unit you should:-

• be familiar with the International Phonetic Alphabet
• be familiar with the principles of phonetic transcription and be able to perform simple broad and narrow phonetic transcription tasks
• have an understanding of speech articulation
• be familiar with the major characteristics of vowels and consonants and with a number of ways of classifying these speech sounds
• understand the distinction between phonemes and allophones and the principles of phonemic analysis
• be familiar with some of the ways that languages and dialects differ in both their phoneme inventories and the pronunciation of their phonemes
• have a basic understanding of the phonology of intonation

Part B. Speech Acoustics

This module examines basic acoustics, the acoustics of speech (acoustic phonetics) and speech signal processing. At the successful completion of this section of the unit you should be familiar with the following topics:-

• Speech waveforms
• Acoustic analysis of sound
• Acoustic theory of speech production
• Acoustic representations of speech
• Vowel Acoustics
• Consonant Acoustics
• Auditory representations of speech
• The acoustics of coarticulation
• The acoustic correlates of prosody
• Speech signal processing

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