Introduction to Corpus Phonetics

Dr. Kevin Tang, Winter 2022: Course catalog

Course Description

This course aims to fill a gap between the students’ knowledge in phonetics and phonology and their ability to applying that knowledge to ask non-trival research questions using a large amount of speech and lexical data. It would cover corpus compilation, semi-automatic annotation (phonetic transcription and forced-alignment), extraction of phonetic and phonological variables and the basics of statistical analyses of corpus data. It complements other courses such as advanced phonetics, quantitative and experimental methods, and corpus/computational linguistics. The course will involve the use of programming languages (such as Python, R and unix commands) and they will be introduced as needed.

While we won’t be using a single textbook, we will likely sample from the following textbook: Harrington, J. (2010). Phonetic analysis of speech corpora. John Wiley & Sons.