Overview

Speech Production and Perception I
Multimedia Course on CD-ROM - $75

  • Developed over three years by teachers of speech science, experts in phonetics and speech research, working with a team of experienced writers, artists and programmers
  • Designed to enable students to acquire an intuitive understanding of the correspondence between sound, spectrum and articulation.
  • Interactive use of the computer for dynamic, experience-based learning with self- or teacher-guided instruction.
  • Uses your Windows-compatible audio card
  • Runs on Windows® 98/Me/NT4*
  • Over 2000 copies are in use at more than 500 universities and institutions
  • Volume discounts are available

*Note: Users of Windows® 2000, Windows® XP, and Windows® Vista operating systems should be aware of the following issues:

-Speech Production and Perception I will not operate in a "limited user" account on Windows XP. It is necessary install and run SPPI in an "Administrator" or a "Power User" account.

-The video clips in the unit on Consonant Acoustics are lacking audio playback from within the course.  These videos can be played properly through Windows® Media Player.

-There have been reports of occasional program crashes, and an inability to record on some machines.

Speech Production and Perception I: An Interactive Multimedia Course provides a non-mathematical introduction to the basic concepts of acoustic phonetics and speech science. The course cultivates genuine understanding of these concepts through personal interaction and experience, using hundreds of interactive models and simulations. Course development was carried out with major support from the National Institutes of Health (MH51970-SBIR).

The course has been created for undergraduate students studying Speech and Hearing Science, Communication Disorders, Linguistics, and Phonetics. Computer Science and Electrical Engineering students interested in speech transmission and processing will also find the course stimulating and useful. Its cost is about the same as that of a good textbook.

Test-teaching at universities and colleges in the United States and Europe has shown that the course is an effective adjunct to lecture- and demonstration-based teaching, as well as a resource for independent learning by students.

The course incorporates its own state-of-the-art graphic interface, including custom-designed high-speed digital signal processing and full color visual displays. The combination of efficient, innovative code and a sophisticated user interface allows students easy access to the full range of course activities and resources.

The present course consists of units on:

  • Spectrograms

  • Vowel Acoustics

  • Consonant Acoustics

  • Speech Perception

  • Vowel Perception

In addition, students have access to:

  • A Library with IPA consonant and vowel charts. The library also contains more than 100 new digitally recorded examples of the consonants and vowels in the charts, with spectrograms of each one, an interactive glossary with definitions of more than 100 technical words and phrases, and cross-references to textbooks;

  • A Lab in which they can make and compare wide- and narrow-band spectrograms of their own utterances, the speech of others, or any other sounds they wish to record.

The course contains more than 200 interactive demonstrations and a dozen interactive exercises on CD-ROM, as well as separate student worksheets, an Installation Guide, and a User’s Guide. Typical interactive demonstrations include adjustable filtering of synthetic voicing sources; plotting the vowel spaces of adult and child speakers; identification and discrimination experiments with speech and non-speech stimuli; creating and analyzing conventional and 3-dimensional spectrograms; and, examining animated vocal tracts synchronized with audio playback and spectrogram displays.

A student workbook with more than 40 pages of questions complements the interactive exercises. The worksheets for the course provide students with a permanent written record of the material covered, and the instructor with a convenient way of evaluating the student’s comprehension of the course content. The worksheets are keyed to the topics in the course; each worksheet contains from 5 to 15 questions, generally requiring paragraph-length answers. The questions cover the course material at various levels, from what might be expected of students in introductory courses to questions suitable for consideration by advanced graduate students.

An Instructor’s Pack, including a Teacher’s Guide with sample answers to worksheet problems, is also available.