Teaching phonetics to undergraduate students majoring speech and hearing sciences and disorders

Abstract

Phonetics is a fundamental course to provide students key knowledge and skills for understanding speech and hearing disorders. In our university, the students are required to take two courses. In Phonetics, we present the basic anatomy and physiology of speech production with emphasis on the three elements, flow, vibrations, and movement. Historical studies on speech production and perception, such as phonetic invariance, perceptual restoration, are presented. Based on the experimental findings, students learned the nature of human communication. That is, speech production is highly adaptive, but speech signal is somewhat varied. In some situations, the top-down processing helps listeners understand speech code. In Phonetics LAB, phonetic transcription, sound productions with vocal tract aerodynamics and acoustics are covered. The acoustic theory of speech production is presented, then the speech waveform and spectrogram of vowels and consonants are explained. Students are requested to show the understanding how speech is produced in reference to the vocal tract shaping and aerodynamics. For speech therapists, it is essential to demonstrate an automatic processing of hearing sounds and knowing the vocal tract. Disordered speech should be understood for possible mechanisms because speech therapists need to modify the human body and its control mechanisms.