LIN

This course introduces students to the speech sounds in human language, including their production, classification, and organization. We will discuss the sounds of the world’s languages and their properties, and we will explore why some sounds are allowed in certain parts of a word but not others. For example, why is “blick” a possible word in English, but not “lbick”? Or, why does English allow words to start with “sp,” but Spanish does not? We will discuss these and other questions as we analyze the patterns for speech sound distribution in various languages. Understanding sound patterns and manipulating them for various effects is helpful for a variety of disciplines, including speech pathology, communication, poetry, literature, psychology, music, and digital media arts, among others.