Phonetics and Phonology

About this Course

About the Course

In this course, Professor Jane Setter (University of Reading) provides an introduction to phonetics and phonology. In the first module, we look at the speech chain and think about how people actually understand speech. In the two modules after that, we explore the use of the phonetic alphabet to represent particular sounds in speech, as well as thinking about the different parameters by which we can categorise vowels and consonants. In the fourth module, we move from phonetics to phonology, and think about how the kinds of sounds that exist in English pattern to create meaning, before turning in the final four modules to consider several aspects of sociophonetics: in the fifth module, we think about why there is so much accent variation in modern England, focusing in particular on the word 'arm'; in the sixth module, we think about accents and accent prejudice; and in the seventh and eight modules, we think about some issues related to speech and gender.

About the Lecturer

Prof. Jane Setter is Professor of Phonetics at the University of Reading. Her main research interests are English phonetics and phonology, English pronunciation and intelligibility (including in World and learner Englishes), phonology in atypical speech populations (specifically Williams syndrome), and phonetics and phonology in Hong Kong English. She is probably best known as co-editor of the eighteenth edition of the Cambridge English Pronouncing Dictionary (2011).