The lectures will be shared by both strands and will cover the following topics:
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The sounds of English |
- Transcription; the vowels and consonants of English
- L1 interference and negative transfer
- How can learners improve their English speech?
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Vowels and consonants |
- Long and short vowels; diphthongs
- Vowel duration: clipping
- Voicing and aspiration: timing and the vocal folds
- Consonants, contrasts, clusters: problems with consonants and syllable structure
- Processes of assimilation, coalescence, and elision
- Weakening: weak forms and other reductions
- Syllabic consonants, compression, varisyllabicity
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Stress |
- Is English stress isochronous?
- Word stress and suffixes: stress effects of word endings
- Stress shift, compounds, phrases; double-stressed words, early stress, late stress
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Intonation |
- The framework for intonation
- Placing the nucleus (tonic); de-accenting
- Tones and tails: rises and falls on and after the nucleus
- Prenuclear patterns: rises and falls before the nucleus
- Intonation and social interaction
- Questions and answers: using intonation to structure a conversation
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Contrastive phonetics |
- Phonetic differences between Spanish and English
- Phonetic differences between Japanese and English
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Special topics |
- Cockney and Estuary English: the regional accent of London and the southeast
- New ideas in phonology: rethinking some traditional ideas on syllable structure
- Viewing and measuring speech: spectrograms, fundamental frequency, formants
- Exotic sounds: including pharyngeals, flaps, ejectives, clicks and many more
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