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The
Phonetics Laboratory in the Harvard Dept. of Linguistics is
located in Boylston 334. The lab contains a PC with a Kay Computer
Speech Lab (CSL) which is used both to teach and to do speech
analysis in tutorials and courses. Course sections often meet
in the lab so that students can do hands-on phonetics work.
Students also receive keys to the lab so they can carry out
individual projects and explore topics covered in class. With
CSL, we can make pitch tracks, spectrograms and spectra to check
hypotheses and carry out experiments. Students in our phonetics
courses regularly carry out projects describing the sound system
of an unfamiliar language. Students also measure vowel formants.
The equipment is particularly useful for understanding the monophthongal
and diphthongal qualities of certain vowels of English and other
languages. Students have carried out acoustic analysis of languages
such as Arabic and Polish for their honors theses.
The department has a portable DAT (digital audio) recorder which
can be used to record elicitation sessions. This recorder can
be used with a head-mounted noise-cancelling microphone which
ensures consistent volume of recording and consistently high
quality.
In addition to the CSL, we also have a Polaroid Macro 5 camera
to do static palatography. This is a very high-quality instant
camera designed for law enforcement work and other kinds of
legal and medical documentation. This camera comes with dental
mirrors that allow us to photograph evidence of lingual articulation
on the palate. Images that we photograph are produced by applying
a charcoal and olive oil emulsion to the speaker's tongue prior
to articulation of a sound. The charcoal that remains on the
palate after articulation shows us where the tongue touched
the palate and thus the place of articulation of that sound.
Students have used this camera to study groups of similar fricatives
in Mandarin Chinese and Polish, as well as some of the phonemes
of Swedish. The camera is available to trained students carrying
out research projects.
The phonetics lab also has a variety of computer resources to
aid in the teaching of phonetics. The Sounds of the World's
Languages data base is available to all students, as are the
computer files that accompany Ladefoged's book 'A Course in
Phonetics.' We also have several CD-ROMs with audio data to
exemplify phonemic contrasts and allophones. |
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