Here's what I'll be teaching this semester (click course title for syllabus):

LING 215: Sounds of Language (undergraduate) An introduction to phonetics and phonology, the linguistic subfields concerned with describing and explaining how speech sounds are made, used, heard, and mentally organized.

LING 414: Sociophonetics (graduate/undergraduate) Everyone has an accent. Moreover, everyone’s accent varies depending on who they are talking to, what they are talking about, what kind of personal identity they want to convey, and other contextual factors, and listeners accordingly attribute social meaning to the variation that they hear. In this course students will learn how sociophonetic variation in production and perception can be systematically studied to answer questions about language, social meaning, and the link between them. The first part of the course will focus on the acoustic analysis of conversational speech. The second part will turn to the experimental study of speech perception and social meaning, accent change over the lifespan, and the implications of sociophonetic variation for phonological theory. Students will develop skills throughout this course that will enable them to 1) make appropriate methodological choices when planning research projects in sociophonetics, 2) use tools such as ELAN, PRAAT, FAVE, NORM, and R to facilitate data processing, and 3) critically evaluate (socio)phonetic studies of language.