Laboratory Phonetics and Phonology: Skills, Tools, and Analyses

Prof. Dr. Kevin Tang, Winter 2025: Course catalog

Course Description

This is a seminar course that aims to provide you with both theoretical and applied skills in the area of laboratory phonetics and phonology. It is designed to enable you to learn the process of a speech production experiment from start to finish. This course has two components:

i) Theoretical background of experimental phonetics and phonology through paper reading. This aims to provide you with the breadth this field can offer.

ii) Skill acquisition through hands-on laboratory work in a lab ( https://slam.phil.hhu.de/) being both a participant and an experimenter, and being an analyist. This aims to provide you with the depth this field can offer.

Audience

This is ideal for students with a passion for speech (phonetics, phonology) and would like to gain hands-on experience with data collection in a phonetics lab as well as experimental methods (collecting and analysing data from participants).

Learning outcomes

  • Explain the basic approach of laboratory phonetics and phonology research
  • Execute a speech production experiment
  • Examine experimental data

Course schedule

  • Week 1: Intro to the course, a short visit of the physical laboratory
  • Week 2 and 3: Theoretical background (Theory 1): Read and discuss two research articles on laboratory phonology or corpus phonetics including the Bonn Tempo paper – the basis of the lab work
  • Week 4 and 5: Theoretical background (Theory 2): Read and discuss the Bonn Tempo paper and their dataset – the basis of the lab work
  • Week 6 to 9: Skill acquistion (Hands-on 1): Work in a phonetics laboratory, including using the SpeechRecorder tool and run an existing speech production project, created by students last year
  • Week 10 to 14: Skill acquistion (Hands-on 2): phonetic and phonological analyses with web-tools and existing Praat/R scripts
  • Week 15: Wrapping up – Reproducible research

Requirements

  • Lab-component: skill-based – group-work in pairs Conduct recordings as an experimenter and as a participant
  • Two out of three reflecton posts and write one page response paper on one or a combination of papers
  • Two analysis exercises: One on data processing, and one on data analyses

Prerequisite

None. Some basic knowledge of phonetics will be helpful. We do NOT assume knowledge of Praat, R or any tools. All will be covered as needed.