A Laboratory Course for Undergraduate Students of Phonetics.

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

3. Course Structure and Content

The course consisted of 17 laboratory exercises, each centred on a given topic and included suggested background readings as well as demonstrations and experiments. The total number of contact hours was thirty, but students had access to the laboratory outside these hours and were free to work through the course at their

own pace, but within given deadlines. All instructions for the laboratory exercises were in the form of web pages, but the course recommended textbook was used for the background readings. Questionnaires, assignments and student tracking were administered using Internet-based tools. This part of the course was developed with the help of the WebCT [URL1] course development tool. All acoustic analyses were made outside the Internet environment, using the ESPS/Waves+ analysis package. Since the instructions for the exercises were made with a particular analysis package and computer environment in mind it was possible to tailor all accompanying illustrations so that they corresponded exactly to what the students encountered on their screens as they performed the experiments. Experiments and measurements were performed on pre-recorded material accessible as digitized sound files. Although the equipment would have allowed on-line recording this option was not used because earlier tests had shown the sound quality of such recordings to be too poor for the analyses to be undertaken. The sound files contained simple and complex nonspeech signals as well as recorded speech illustrating various linguistic phenomena such as VOT, vowel quantity, fundamental frequency contours. The non-speech signals were used to familiarize the students with analysis techniques and units used in describing acoustic properties like decibel and Hertz. In the speech files students measured selected acoustic parameters and were asked to reflect upon their significance for speech production and perception. The perception experiments were accessed from a web page. All programs were written in Java and could in principle run as Java applications inside the browser but due to the rather poor sound quality in Java, only one of the experiments was delivered this way. The rest ran in windows outside the browser and used audio tools from the UNIX environment. Data collection and analyses were also run in a UNIX environment. The results were sent back to the students in the form of Java applets readable in their web browsers. The student's own result was presented, in the form of a diagram, immediately upon the completion of the experiment, and the combined result of the whole group of students was presented in another diagram. The diagram showing the results for the whole group could be updated at any time to include the most recent results until all students had completed the task. The perception tests were chosen to illustrate some basic properties of the auditory system such as temporal integration and the threshold of hearing. In addition a re-creation of a classical test on Categorical Perception was included.

4. Environment in Which the Course was Taught

The laboratory in which the course was given was equipped with nine Sun Ultra 1 SparcStations connected to the university network. Each computer was equipped with three headphones so that students could listen to the sound files they were working with without disturbing other students or groups. The number of students taking the course has ranged from 15 to 20. During contact hours students thus had to work in groups of 2 or 3. Although students were, thus, allowed to work in groups, all assignments had to be handed in (i.e. submitted over the net) individually. Outside contact hours they often worked alone.

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