Articulatory Phonetics Final Project

Assignment overview

In your (final) final project submission, you're going to expand on the work you did throughout the course and turn it into a complete research proposal. While you do, you'll also have a chance to practice using the traditional structure of a phonetics research paper and to continue using the scientific style of writing you've used on previous assignments.

Below, I break down the requirements for this project. Please read through the document as well as the grading rubric, and let me know if you have any questions. Before we get there, though, I have two notes.

First, in each section, I'm giving you a bit more room than I initially did. This is mostly to give you an opportunity to explain your research plan a little more extensively, though I'd also like you to include a couple more citations now that you've had more time to think through your projects. (I explain what I'm looking for below.)

Second, it's still acceptable—even normal%mdash;to change big and small aspects of your project. It's the nature of research! Try to revisit your previous work with a fresh, critical eye. Check if you have a cohesive story: do your questions, hypotheses, and predictions make sense? Does your method really fit the question? Be prepared to make more revisions. And remember, revisions—even substantial ones—aren't about being right or wrong, good or bad; instead, they're about polishing your core ideas. Consider making an office hours appointment to help make your project better!

On to the instructions.

Assignment instructions

Style

Summary

  • Written in a scientific style
  • Uses appropriate headings: Introduction, Method, Result, and Conclusion

Details

Use the scientific style from the previous assignments for your writing.

A phonetics paper has 4 sections: the introduction, method, result, and discussion. There's also usually an abstract at the beginning and a conclusion at the end which briefly summarize the project and its implications, but this project is short enough that you don't need them. Use the Introduction/Method/Result/Discussion pattern to organize your work. Each section should have a heading, as I demonstrate in the rest of this document (i.e., the beginning of the Introduction section starts with the word "Introduction" on its own line). You may also want a "References" section header to indicate where your discussion ends and your list of references begins.

Introduction

Summary

  • 350-500 words
  • 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 5 citations that are relevant to the questions/hypotheses/predictions, 4 of which must be academic sources

Details

Your introduction should be around 350-500 words. It should be the same structure as the part 2 assignment you wrote in the middle of the term, with a broad question, a specific question, a description of the vocal behavior, two competing testable hypotheses, and at least one prediction of each hypothesis. If you're not sure what any of that means or if you've done it, ask me for help or review the instructions and supporting videos from part 2.

Please use at least 5 citations (just 2 more than you did in the part 2 assignment). At least 4 should be from an academic source. Remember, citations are about using other people's work to support your own ideas. By asking for 5 citations, I'm really asking for arguments and motivations that are a little more thorough than what you wrote in part 2. That's also why the word count was increased from 250-350 to 350-500.

Method

Summary

  • 350-500 words
  • Describe your participant(s).
  • Describe the data you will ask your participants to produce.
  • Identify which articulatory measurement tool(s) you will use and explain why the tool is a good fit for assessing your predictions.
  • Describe what you plan to measure with your tool.
  • At least 1 academic citation (see details below)

Details

Your method should be around 350-500 words. It should have the same content as in part 3, except that you don't need to re-state your hypotheses and predictions this time.

Consider using sub-headings for the different parts of your method. These can be a little more flexible, but it's traditional to see sub-headings like "Participants" for talking about the people giving data in the study and "Experiment design" for a description of the tool you used, how you set it up, and how you measured data. Feel free to use sub-headings that help you organize your method to make your reader's life easier. (Unlike the major headings, I don't care so much what you call these optional sub-headings.)

In addition to what you wrote before, I now require at least 1 academic citation in the method. This can be for either (or both):

  • A related project that has used the articulatory tool you plan to use. This helps you show that your project/method isn't coming completely out of the blue.
  • A related project that used a different tool, and an explanation of why your tool is a better choice. This helps show that you understand your tool well enough to advocate for it over others.

Result

Summary

  • 50-200 words
  • Describe your expectations for the outcome of your experiment.

Details

I do not expect you to actually perform your experiment on anyone. But, in this section, you're going to spend 50-200 words pretending you did. (If you do run this experiment somehow, feel free to write about it here instead of pretending.)

The result section of a research paper usually reports on the statistics you ran on your data for testing your hypothesis. It's often the most difficult section of a paper to read, but it's also the most important for demonstrating which of your hypotheses was "true". The result section is for "answering" your specific question.

Since you're not actually doing this experiment and I haven't taught you any statistics, you just need to explain your personal expectations about the outcome of your experiment in terms of which predictions will be born out and by how much, and the reason for your expectation (still using the impersonal scientific style). If you have the skills and the time, you can make fake box plots (phoneticians love box plots!) to visually demonstrate what you think the results will look like.

Your expectations should be new information for the reader. In most cases, you should present all your hypotheses and predictions as equally likely when you describe them in your introduction. The result section is the first time we should hear your opinion about the experiment, and that's just because we don't have the option of running statistical tests to tell us what the outcome was.

Discussion

Summary

  • 200-300 words
  • Describe your consultant and the insight(s) they brought to this project.
  • Describe the extent to which your project ended up being useful for your consultant or other people who do this vocal behavior.
  • Describe how your expected result would impact linguistics/speech science.

Details

Your discussion should be 200-300 words. Typically, the discussion starts by presenting the information from the result section in a way that's easier to read than parsing through statistics. Then, the author demonstrates the implications of the results for the big picture question(s). The discussion is where you "answer" the big picture question, or at least hint at what an answer might be.

You're going to start a little differently because you don't have any real results, but you can still talk about how your expected results would be impactful.

Start by describing your consultant and the insight(s) they brought to the project (see part 1). Then, describe the extent to which your consultant's insight(s) influenced your project and the extent to which you feel that your research project ended up addressing the needs/desires of your consultant or other people who perform this vocal behavior.

Be honest here! Points won't be taken off just because your consultant didn't help much or your experiment didn't end up being interesting/helpful for your consultant. You'll get full points here as long as you show that you're aware of these issues.

The other part of your discussion should address how you feel your expected result would impact linguistics/speech science. This is where you try to tentatively answer the big question you asked at the beginning of the paper. No one expects you to actually answer the big question, so don't make it sound like your experiment is the final word on anything. But well-reasoned research is a good contribution to science, no matter its size, and it's important to explain why your work has an impact.

References

Include the full references for all the citations you use at the end of your paper. (These should total at least 6; 5 from the introduction, and 1 from the method.) I don't care if you use MLA or APA reference format, but try to be consistent. You should at least include the author(s), year of publication, title, and soure of the work. These references do not count toward your word count (though your in-line Author-Year citations do).