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Short Paper 269 PDF
Short Paper 269 PDF
Anders Eriksson
Department of Phonetics, Ume University, S-901 87 Ume, Sweden
E-mail: anderse@ling.umu.se
Abstract: A laboratory course for undergraduate students of phonetics has been developed
and tested at the Department of Phonetics at Ume university. The course consists of
exercises designed to acquaint the students with basic acoustic analysis methods and a section
on speech perception. All instructions were in the form of web pages. Questionnaires,
assignments and student tracking were administered using Internet-based tools. Acoustic
analyses were made using the ESPS/Waves+ analysis package; the perception experiments
were run either entirely within a web browser or called from a web page but run in a separate
X-window. Data collection and analyses were made in the UNIX environment and the results
sent back to the students in the form of Java applets readable in web browsers.
1. Background
Laboratory work in phonetics or speech science is particularly well suited for telematic teaching. Students often
work alone or in small groups, analysing their own voices or stored data, using computer-based analysis tools.
Traditionally taught laboratory courses could therefore quite easily be transformed into telematic courses as far
as content and methods are concerned. However, present limitations in bandwidth make the transfer of speech
data too slow to be practical. This problem can be circumvented by storing the sound files on the local computer
and running the analysis programs locally for example as Java applications. However, today there are no analysis
tools available in versions that run inside a web browser, locally or over the Internet, and the sound handling
capability in Java is still too poor to be used for things other than demonstrations. It is highly likely that these
problems will be overcome in the not too distant future. But until that happens, a laboratory course like the one
described here, will have to combine Internet based components with components which run outside the Internet
environment. Instructions, examples and demonstrations, course administration and student tracking may all be
run in an Internet environment while audio files and acoustic analyses are better handled outside the Internet
environment, typically locally on the users own machines.
2. Course Objectives
A laboratory course for undergraduate students of phonetics, recognising the present limitations, has been
developed and tested at the Department of Phonetics at Ume University. The laboratory course was time-tabled
towards the end of the first semester of a full-time course on phonetics.
The goals of the course were for the students to become familiar with
1) basic concepts of the acoustic analysis of speech
2) basic tools used in the acoustic analysis of speech and learn how to use them for simple analyses
3) fundamental concepts and problems in speech perception
4) experimental techniques used in speech perception research
5. Results
The course has been given twice to first semester phonetics students and also once to a group of speech therapy
students. Most students had no, or very little, experience with computers. Needless to say, this caused some
initial problems, but this disadvantage was outweighed by the students feeling that the exposure to computers
and the Internet was something generally beneficial and a kind of knowledge that would become useful to them
in other contexts. Comparing the students results on theoretical parts of their written tests and assignments, they
performed on par with students in previous years when the course was taught in the form of lectures
supplemented by a few laboratory exercises. Their command of analysis procedures was, however, markedly
better as was their understanding of these procedures and the relevance of acoustic analysis in the study of
speech. Their understanding of experimental techniques and results in the field of speech perception was also
improved. The immediate feedback of the results of their own perception tests and the possibility to view the
accumulated results develop, as more subjects completed the task, gave them deeper insights both into
experimental techniques as such and the particular aspects illustrated by a given test.
6. References
[URL1] WebCT is a course-authoring tool developed at the University of British Columbia. More information may be found
at: http://homebrew1.cs.ubc.ca/webct/
Acknowledgements
The course was developed as part of a research programme supported by a grant from Hgskoleverket,
Grundutbildningsrdet (National Agency for Higher Education: Council for the Renewal of Undergraduate Education), Grant
number 08495