Phonetics and phonology: The science of speech sounds

The study of speech sounds is essential to industries such as: speech recognition and AI; forensic linguistics; speech pathology; education; and more. This unit begins by exploring how the wide variety of sounds of spoken languages around the world are produced in the vocal tract, and how linguists transcribe these sounds using the International Phonetic Alphabet. 

We then investigate how speech sounds are organised in the mind and are used to convey meaning. Sounds will change depending on where they appear, and this is critical for comprehending and producing speech, as well as processing written forms for reading and spelling (e.g. English ‘p’ is pronounced very differently at the start and the end a word).

You may then select from a range of focused modules to apply this foundational knowledge to particular contexts, including: the justice system (forensic phonetics); AI and speech recognition (computational linguistics); child language  acquisition (psycholinguistics); language change (historical linguistics); the different sounds of Englishes around the world (world Englishes); race, gender and implicit bias (sociophonetics).