Articulatory Phonetics Final Project Part 1
Assignment overview
By now you've seen a several examples of vocal behaviors that use the vocal tract articulators, including speech behaviors (e.g., heavy metal singing, beatrhyming, and whistle languages) and nonspeech behaviors (e.g., overtone singing, beatboxing), as well as speech disorders (e.g., dysarthria). And this is just the tip of the metaphorical iceberg!
For your final project, you'll write a research proposal to study some vocal behavior of your choice. The rest of your writing assignments for the quarter are all components of your research proposal. The strategy is that by writing the paper in small-ish chunks (and then revising each chunk based on regular feedback), you'll find the final workload much more manageable and of higher quality. This research proposal takes the place of the final exam, as outlined in the syllabus.
The first phase of your project is to find someone who performs some kind of vocal behavior, talk to them about it, and develop some potential research questions with them. The written portion of the assignment (the last step) should be 250-350 words.
In the rest of this document I describe the things you'll need to do for this assignment ("Steps to success"), then offer some advice for getting the most out of it ("Recommendations from your teacher").
Steps to success
Step 1: Read about strong objectivity
We've briefly looked at different types of vocal behaviors aside from "talking" to get a sense of the scope of the many different behaviors that can be described through articulatory phonetics. Generally, these non-"talking" behaviors are marginalized or considered "fringe" in linguistics and speech science. But with the right perspective (and some good research questions), research in a variety of vocal behaviors could reveal new insights about speech that we might never have thought of otherwise. (As you may recall, we call this the "anthropophonic" approach.)
To start this project, read "Science Under the Scope" by Sophie Wang. The point of this reading is to emphasize the importance of working with people who aren't usually represented in science to broaden the scope of scientific inquiry (a perspective to which the anthropophonic approach is closely connected).
You can read it here all at once, or you can read it one bit at a time starting from the first section here. If you are pressed for time or wholly disinterested, just read from the beginning through section 2 (stopping when you get to section 3, "Who benefits?").
"Science Under the Scope" is written in comic form, which I find more enjoyable to read than the usual scientific/book format. However, I recognize that it's not always the easiest to read. A text-only version provided to us by the author is available on the course website.
Step 2: Find someone with an interesting vocal behavior
Find someone you know who does a vocal behavior that you find interesting. (In the unlikely event that no one you know does any vocal behavior except for talking, try to make a new friend.) Ask if that person would be willing to talk to you about the vocal behavior they do. If they say "yes", then congratulations: you have a consultant to work with!
The vocal behavior
The behavior could be as simple as a "weird" sound they like to make, or as complex as a whole style of speech or vocal performance, or a speech disorder of some kind. (If you're not sure whether the vocal behavior you want to study is a good fit for the project, ask your teacher for a bit of guidance.)
The consultant
The best consultants are experts of their vocal behavior and have something they want to know or prove about it. People who are trying to learn the behavior (but not yet experts) can be good consultants too because specific questions often arise from practicing a new skill. Ideally, your consultant will be eager to speak to you about what they do.
If you do an interesting vocal behavior and would be open to being a consultant for someone else's project, feel free to offer to be a consultant for your classmates. If you have trouble finding a consultant or vocal behavior, email your teacher some assistance. One point of this project is to pull in other people's perspectives, so you can't use yourself as a consultant.
Step 3: Develop questions with your consultant
Work with your consultant to generate some potential research questions about their vocal behavior. The best questions are those that potentially offer new insights to linguistics or speech science, serve a practical need in the community of people who do the behavior, and are narrow enough to be addressed in a small experiment. I've written more about this near the end of the assignment description.
Spend some time talking to your consultant, getting them to open up about the behavior. There are a few sample questions near the end of the assignment description to help you get started, but note the best research questions usually come from discussion rather than an inquisition—so try to come up with your own questions and get your consultant talking about what they do. Make sure to explain your interests too, so your consultant knows what kinds of questions you're thinking about.
You should warn your consultant that your final project assignment is just a research proposal—while you'll have to think a decent amount about your questions and hypotheses, you won't be required to actually perform an experiment and try to find answers (though you can certainly try if you want to).
Step 4: Write
Use the work you've done in the previous steps to write about your consultant, their vocal behavior, and your discussion together. Write 250-350 words that include the following:
- Describe the vocal behavior
- Describe your consultant
- Identify 2-3 questions about the vocal behavior that you and your consultant came up with together
- For each question, describe why the question is interesting both for you as a scientist and for your consultant.
Submit what you write to the course site. This part of the project has three stages: the first draft assignment, peer review, and the revise-and-resubmit assignment. The details for these assignments will be posted closer to their due dates.
Recommendations from your teacher
Choosing a vocal behavior
Since you'll have to do a literature review of this vocal behavior, you would be wise to get a sense early on of how much previous research about this behavior has been. Picking a vocal behavior with little or no existing research can be exciting and have lots of easy questions to start with, but finding relevant support for your questions and hypotheses becomes more difficult. On the other hand, although choosing a vocal behavior with lots of existing research means your questions can be more grounded in scientific literature (which is good), it makes finding unanswered questions a little more challenging. You don't have to make your decision based on how much research there already is, but you should know what you're getting yourself into.
(As a rule of thumb, more popular behaviors or behaviors with a long history are likely to have easy-to-find research. And as you read about in Step 1, many research topics (including vocal behaviors) are under-researched simply because of who has and who hasn't been doing the research so far.)
Find a behavior you're interested in so the assignment will seem more like a fun project than an awful chore. I encourage you to pick something relevant to your culture and experiences.
Learning about your consultant and the vocal behavior
Sample questions to ask your consultant about their vocal behavior
- Who does this vocal behavior?
- In what (social) contexts is it used?
- How popular is it?
- Where/when did it come from? Has it evolved since then?
Sample questions to ask the consultant about themselves
- What's their relationship with this vocal behavior?
- When did they start performing/doing it?
- How often do they practice/do it?
- How skilled would they say they are?
Making great research questions
Remember, good questions are narrow and small. Big sweeping questions like "How does vocal behavior X work?" require big sweeping analyses, and nobody has time for that right now. Instead, it's best to focus on some particular aspect of the behavior. For example, if I wanted to research beatboxing, I might think about the following questions.
| Status | Question |
|---|---|
| Too broad: | "How are the different beatboxing sounds articulated?" |
| OK: | "What is the articulatory difference between the Kick Drum and Spit Snare?" |
| Better: | "What is the difference in lip compression between the Kick Drum and Spit Snare?" |
Note that by specifically identifying lip compression in the last question, I've narrowed down the literature review I have to do later—instead of having to research a bunch of articulations and how they're measured, I just have to focus on lip compression! From here, it's also easier to see how beatboxing might be interesting to a linguist or speech scientist (e.g., once we know how lip compression is used in beatboxing, a speech pathologist could use beatboxing as a fun way to train kids to make labial sounds better). Formulating good questions early can save you a lot of time and make your life easier down the road.
But great questions about vocal behaviors are useful to the people who actually use the vocal behavior (and are asked with full awareness of the cultural context in which the behavior is performed)—that's one of many reasons you find a consultant. I'm not a beatboxer myself, so I won't pretend to know how a beatboxing consultant would feel about the "Better" example above. Ideally, my consultant and I would have had equal input throughout the process of creating and narrowing down questions; at the very least, my consultant should agree that the question could be useful or interesting to them.
Your next assignment will require you to pick one of the questions you generate with your consultant and develop hypotheses and predictions for it. We'll talk about making good research questions, hypotheses, and predictions in more detail closer to when that assignment is due.