LING412-25S2 (C) Semester Two 2025

Sociophonetic Research

30 points

Details:
Start Date: Monday, 14 July 2025
End Date: Sunday, 9 November 2025
Withdrawal Dates
Last Day to withdraw from this course:
  • Without financial penalty (full fee refund): Sunday, 27 July 2025
  • Without academic penalty (including no fee refund): Sunday, 28 September 2025

Description

Aspects of socially-conditioned phonetic variation in speech. These include sound change, social and regional variation, phonetic style-shifting, and the study of how socially-conditioned phonetic variation can be accommodated by models of speech perception and production.

Work in sociophonetics sits at the interface between sociolinguistics and phonetics. The specific topics we address in this course will be determined by students' interests, but likely areas of investigation include (i) speech production: how does speech production vary? What phonetic aspects of speech function indexically? That is, which aspects of pronunciation correlate with non-linguistic factors? How does speech vary between speakers, e.g. according to their age, gender, social class, regional background, ethnicity? How does speech vary within speakers, e.g. according to their speaking style, their communicative context, their emotional state, their attitude? (ii) sociophonetic methodology: what things need to be considered when collecting data for sociophonetic research? What is the best type of recording equipment (recorders, microphones etc)? What about the practicalities of recording 'good' data? How do we compile a sociophonetics corpus of speech?  What are the best statistical techniques to use for sociophonetic work?

Learning Outcomes

This course will provide students with an opportunity to develop the Graduate Attributes specified below:

University Graduate Attributes

This course will provide students with an opportunity to develop the Graduate Attributes specified below:

Critically competent in a core academic discipline of their award

Students know and can critically evaluate and, where applicable, apply this knowledge to topics/issues within their majoring subject.

Prerequisites

Subject to approval of the Head of Department.

Course Coordinator

Lynn Clark

Assessment

Assessment Due Date Percentage 
Record a sociolinguistic interview 10%
Transcribe interview in ELAN 20%
Upload interview into LaBB-CAT 5%
Complete forced alignment and manually correct out of dictionary words 5%
Extract csv needed for project 5%
Mock peer review of journal article 20%
PROJECT: create your own adventure 35%

Indicative Fees

Domestic fee $2,169.00

* All fees are inclusive of NZ GST or any equivalent overseas tax, and do not include any programme level discount or additional course-related expenses.

Minimum enrolments

This course will not be offered if fewer than 2 people apply to enrol.

For further information see Language, Social and Political Sciences .

All LING412 Occurrences

  • LING412-25S2 (C) Semester Two 2025
  • LING412-25S2 (D) Semester Two 2025 (Distance)
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