1. What to expect / how to prepare
- The exam is in the classroom, on paper, closed-book
- The exam is written to take about 90 minutes to complete,
which leaves you time to check your work
- You may prepare and bring one page of notes:
- Letter-size paper (8.5 x 11 inches) or A4, or smaller
- Write on one side only
- On the other side, you may print out the
2020 IPA chart
(remember to
be careful about "hooktop-a", [a])
- Your notes page must be handwritten — no screenshots or scans
- Your notes page must be turned in with the exam (but it won't be graded)
- No calculators may be used for this exam
- You may solve for the variable in question and leave your answers in the form of fractions
(or do simple calculations by hand)
- Students with ARS accommodations who wish to take their exam at the Testing Center
should follow ARS policies for registering
- Please let me know ASAP if you will need different accommodations
2. Course content covered by the exam
- The exam is cumulative; the topics covered will reflect the whole course,
but with a focus on topics covered since the midterm
- See study guide for the midterm exam
(basic acoustics; tube resonance frequencies; the source-filter model; perturbation & multiple-tube models; vowels)
- The rest of this page is a study guide for the second part of the course
- Reminder: You need to be able to use the terms waveform, spectrum, and
spectrogram correctly; these are all different types of displays that give us different types of information
A. The phonetics of consonants
- Be able to discuss the source(s) and filter(s) that are
involved in each class of pulmonic consonants we have investigated:
- fricatives, stops, affricates, nasals, [l],
[ɹ], glides
- Be able to use tube models of the vocal tract to predict formants and
antiformants for nasals and [l]
- Be able to identify voicing, place of articulation,
and manner of articulation from a waveform + spectrogram display
- Most of the questions in this category will involve matching
a display to a transcription, or choosing an answer from a set of options
- But, be able to defend your waveform/spectrogram interpretations
with reference to aspects of the source-filter model
- Vocal-fold vibration: Understand the basic muscular and
aerodynamic factors involved (myoelastic-aerodynamic model)
- What is the role of muscular tension?
- What is the role of air pressure?
- Voice onset time (VOT)
- Understand how the actions of the articulators
give rise to different VOT values
- Know how to measure VOT, given a waveform + spectrogram
display
- Airstream mechanisms
- Be able to explain what causes air to move
for ejectives specifically
- Given a waveform and/or spectrogram:
- Be able to distinguish ejectives from voiceless plosives
- Phonation types
- Be able to explain the articulatory differences between
breathy, modal, and creaky phonation
- Understand the relationship between the "open quotient", the
shape of the waveform, and the glottal source spectrum; be able to use
these properties to distinguish the different phonation types
- Be able to distinguish among modal, breathy, and creaky phonation
(during the production of a vowel) on a waveform or waveform+spectrogram display
B. Applying phonetics knowledge in linguistics research
- Case studies where we can use phonetics knowledge to answer broader questions
- Sociophonetics — using phonetic analysis to diagnose differences among language varieties, social groups, or speaker behavior in different situations
- What is the reason for using the Wells lexical sets in discussing English phonetics?
- What is a vowel shift?
- Be prepared to use your knowledge of phonetics to comment on or describe some other kind of language phenomenon
- Experimental phonetics and DSP
- Be able to interpret quantitative information (i.e., data from Praat)
to reach conclusions about speech sounds; you will not need to explain how to get this information from Praat,
but be able to interpret such information and relate it to articulation and the source-filter model
Examples:
- Duration (VOT, vowel or consonant duration, etc.)
- f0
- Vowel formants
- Formant transitions due to consonant place of articulation
- Fricative center of gravity/centroid (first spectral moment)
and dispersion/standard deviation (second spectral moment)
- Understand basic concepts in working with digital sound files
- Understand the difference between continuous (analog) and discrete
(digital) representations of a sound wave
- Know what sampling rate
is, and what factors should be considered in setting this value
- Be able to bring your knowledge of phonetics to bear in
thinking critically about an experiment; examples:
- Be able to state a hypothesis on the basis of phonetic facts or facts about a language
- Be able to design materials to probe a particular research question
- Be able to critique how well a given experimental design relates to a particular research question
- Basic concepts in speech perception
- What are some of the factors that cause perceptual properties
of speech sounds to differ from their acoustic properties?
3. General study suggestions
- Use class slides along with readings to get a
sense of what material will be emphasized most. Look over the readings
again to see how the various concepts we have covered fit together.
- Be able to solve a problem that is like any of
the problems that have appeared on lab assignments, prep questions, or the
midterm exam. You may want to try doing assignment
or exam problems again without
looking at the answers. Try to understand
the general concepts behind the problems.
Be able to apply what you know to new contexts or situations.
- Be able to answer "application questions" using your
knowledge of the material — for example, be able to propose an
explanation for a fact about the sounds of some language based
on what you know about articulation or acoustics.