Articulatory Phonetics Final Project Part 2

Assignment overvew

In the first part of this project, you found a consultant, talked about their vocal behavior, and generated some questions. In the second part, you'll do a little bit of research on one of your questions, generate some hypotheses, and then identify predictions of those hypotheses. This will set you up for part 3, in which you'll describe a method for testing your hypotheses.

You might find that you need to adjust your question after doing some research, and that's perfectly fine. You won't be graded on how similar your question in this assignment is to the questions in your previous assignment. Instead, we want you to focus on doing the best work you can, which usually involves some changes from assignment to assignment.

You'll do this part in three installments, just like the last one: the first draft assignment, the peer review, and the revise-and-resubmit assignment. The revise-and-resubmit assignment should be about 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: Prepare

In order to write about the hypotheses and predictions of your question, you have to figure out what the hypotheses and predictions are. That usually goes hand-in-hand with looking up previous research related to your topic, which you'll use to support your argument when you write. You'll probably find yourself going back and forth between finding previous research and clarifying your hypotheses/predictions rather than doing one completely before the other.

Develop hypotheses and predictions for your question

I've made some videos to help you work on your questions, hypotheses, and predictions. There's a video with an overview of the role of questions, hypotheses, and predictions in scientific research, another in which I lay out these elements for my favorite vocal behavior beatrhyming, and one where I adapt the previous video's beatrhyming work into an example of this assignment (see the course site for the example).

I don't expect you to write like me—in fact, it's probably best if you don't—but I do hope you'll have a better sense of how I think about this assignment and the kinds of things you might do with it. After you watch those videos, take some time to work more on the questions, hypotheses, and predictions for your own work before you try to write any serious drafts.

One of the new things I'm asking for in this assignment is that you relate your question to some aspect of vocal articulation (since this is an articulatory phonetics class). If you're not sure how to do that with your current questions, send me an email or set up an office hours appointment and I'll be glad to help!

Find previous research to support your argument

The point of citing other people's work is to help build a case for the importance of your work. If you write without citing anybody, your academic readers will think you just made everything up. To convince your readers that what you're writing about is worth studying, you have to demonstrate that other scientists are worried about similar issues.

Professional scholars spend days and weeks at a time looking for previous research related to their questions. I recognize that you probably have a lot of other things going on in your life that are more important than this project, so I'm only asking for 3 citations: 2 from academic sources, and 1 from anywhere. As a rule of thumb, anything you find on Google Scholar counts as an academic source for this project.

In most cases, the third reference that doesn't have to be from an academic source will cite your consultant or a description of the vocal behavior you're studying. This citation can be from an academic source, but it could also be something like personal communication with your consultant (cited as "(Consultant's Last Name, personal communication)") or an example on YouTube video (cited as "(Content Creator's Last Name, year of upload)").

Step 2: 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:

An overarching question/context
A specific question (or, specific aim of the text)
A description of the vocal behavior
At least two hypotheses that offer potential answers to the specific question
At least one prediction for each hypothesis
At least 3 citations that are relevant to the questions/hypotheses/predictions, 2 of which must be academic sources
A connection to articulation
Written in a scientific style

One of the videos I posted for this assignment describes the elements of scientific writing style I'm particularly interested in: avoiding overstatements, portraying objectivity, and citing others. All of these elements of style should help you craft more compelling work.

Your citations should have full references at the bottom of the page. It doesn't matter what formatting type you use (e.g., MLA, APA). Do not include the full references in your word count.

A note about the word count limit: while there are a few more requirements for this assignment than previous ones, the beatrhyming example I shared demonstrates that the assignment can be done while staying close to the lower end of this word limit. The point of the word count limit is to help you write efficiently and to make these assignments easier to grade. If you have trouble with the word count, set up an office hours appointment and I'll help you make cuts.

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.

Below is some advice for finding citations for this project.

Recommendations from your teacher

How to do research in general

Make a list of words and phrases to search on. Try to come up with at least 20 different words and phrases—the more specific, the better. As you'll see in the next section, there are lots of different angles to your project; develop search terms based on those.

Then, use the search terms you thought of to look for articles. I recommend using Google Scholar. It's easy, free, and works pretty well a lot of the time. Even so, be willing to page through more than just the first page of results; sometimes you find something really good on the 20th search result page.

Start by trying to find 5-10 articles. Read the abstracts of those articles and skim their contents to determine how relevant they are. If you think the article might be relevant, take some notes! Help your future self by writing a brief summary about the questions, hypotheses, and results/conclusions. Try to describe how the paper relates to your question, what ideas it gives you for hypotheses/predictions, or how you disagree with what it says.

Have a look at the links below for some additional guidance on finding previous research.

How to do research on an obscure topic

Your question might focus on a rare or understudied vocal behavior, which might make you nervous about whether you can find any previous literature about it for your citations. It's true that searching for the behavior itself might not turn anything up, but that's okay! In fact, even if you pick a topic with lots of previous research (e.g., operatic singing), you might not find anything related to your specific angle. That's kind of good news, actually, because it means answering your question would make an original contribution to science. Exciting!

So how do you find previous research about a topic no one has written about? The trick is to remember that your questions are asked in a context. Why is your question interesting to linguistics/speech science? What previous big ideas led up to yours? What previous claims have excluded the vocal behavior you're studying? What assumptions are buried in your questions?

There are plenty of ways to find relevant previous research. I would start by creating search terms based on the list below, but the more you read, the more new angles you discover!

Behaviors that are related to your topic behavior
Assumptions built into your questions
Other research that addressed your big-picture question(s) in a different way or that you can build off of
The anatomical features of the vocal tract used by your topic behavior

We'll use my beatrhyming topic as an example. Beatrhyming is a very new art form, and there aren't any scholarly papers written about it yet (at least, none that I could find). So I looked for literature about other parts of my questions instead. (In fact, I would have looked for literature about the other parts of my questions regardless of whether I had found previous work on beatrhyming.)

One of my big-picture questions is "Are the cognitive units of speech used exclusively for speech/language?". My most specific question is "Are beatboxing sounds and speech sounds linked by place of articulation in beatrhyming?". Based on these two questions, I would consider developing search terms based on related issues like:

Beatboxing, and specifically the place of articulation of beatboxing sounds (because beatrhyming involves beatboxing sounds)
What makes speech intelligible/understandable (because an assumption in my specific question is that beatrhyming is like any other speech style: the listener should be able to understand it)
How speech sounds were created and evolve over time (related to one of my bigger questions and a motivation for my research topic)
How vocal tract anatomy determines what possible speech sounds are (a more anatomical point of view related to the bigger question)

(I would probably not use those phrases exactly, or at least I'd search other related keywords and phrases afterward too.)

Good research takes time, but the rewards are worth the effort!