LING521

Term Project Prospectus: Due 3/21/2016

Your term project should involve the ideas and applications evoked by the course's theme: "Corpus-based phonetics". In other words, your project should be based on phonetic analysis of a corpus of recorded sound.

In most cases, you'll choose a speech dataset that is also transcribed; perhaps the transcripts will already be time-aligned with the audio and furnished with phonetic as well as orthographic versions, or perhaps you'll use forced alignment to take care of that yourself. However, it's also possible to do a project that depends on analysis that can be done on audio only (perhaps with associated articulatory or physiological data) -- for example, you could look at changes in f0 variation across the lifetime, if you had a suitable collection of longitudinal recordings of specific speakers, or you could look at the distributions of speech and silence segments given an effective SAD program.

Your project should be aimed at evaluating a hypothesis or answering a question. Your goal might be a general descriptive one, e.g. "What happens with phonological feature X in context Y in conversational speech in language Z?", or it might be a more specific one, e.g. "Despite appearances, tone is (not?) really neutralized in unstressed syllables in fluent speech in language Z", or "The domain of tone in language Z is the mora/syllable/word/phrase".

In any case, your project should aim at new empirical results, and you should plan to submit the final paper to a conference and/or a journal. A list of suitable conferences will be circulated later on.

For this prospectus, due 3/21/2016, you should:

  1. Specify the dataset you'll be using, and describe it in detail.
  2. State the question or hypothesis you'll be answering or evaluating.
  3. Explain the methods that you'll use, and exemplify them if possible.
  4. Briefly survey the relevant existing literature on the subject, if any.

A first draft of the project write-up will be due in a few weeks; the term project as a whole will be due on the day when this course's final exam would have been held (if there were a final exam, which there isn't).