Phonology: case studies

The sounds of the world's languages

• A Course in Phonetics Hear all the examples in the textbook, and all the sounds of the IPA (see "The IPA Chart").
• IPA Handbook The website for the IPA Handbook. Includes recordings of all the transcribed language samples in the handbook.
• SIL IPA fonts: Downloadable standard freeware IPA fonts.
• Vocal folds Slow-motion movie of vocal fold vibration. Produced by Peter Ladefoged.
• The Speech Accent Archive: Random samples of many different accents in English, both foreign and native (Thanks to Wes Leavell for bringing it to my attention).
• American English dialects A summary of differences in pronunciation from William Labov.
• Vowel length Vowel length in Kinyarwanda, a language of Rwanda.
• South Carolina Transcription exercise: South Carolina.
• Kinyarwanda Transcription exercise: Kinyarwanda.

Acoustics

• Sine waves An example of superimposition of sine waves.
• Acoustics Some demos of basic acoustics
• PRAAT: An excellent free acoustic analysis and synthesis program.

Speech perception

• The Ladefoged-Broadbent Experiment: A demonstration of speaker normalization.
• Categorical perception: A demonstration of the Lisker-Abramson VOT experiment.
• The McGurk Effect: Showing that visual information is used in speech perception, i.e. that everyone lipreads to some extent.

Phonology

• The Rutgers Optimality Archive The central web-site for papers in Optimality Theory.
• The Metathesis Website Beth Hume's survey of metathesis patterns of the world.
• The 10th Conference on Laboratory Phonology (Paris, June 29 - July 1, 2006)

Speech technology

• AT&T Text-to-Speech demo
• Speech Recognition Speech recognition software for Macintosh