This course will provide a hands-on introduction to Generalized Additive Modeling (GAMs). We will introduce methods to identify the best model given the data, and demonstrate how to visualize non-linear effects and non-linear interactions. In addition, we will address several potential problems, including, but not limited to, dealing with the common problem (for time series data) of encountering autocorrelation in the residuals of a model.

The goal of this course is to provide students with broad training in the nomenclature, theory, and practice of articulatory phonetics. Students in this course will learn about the organs of the vocal tract used in speech production, the muscles controlling them, and their coordination. We will also discuss factors thought to affect speech articulation, including speaker-internal factors (e.g. aerodynamics, coarticulation, speech rate), speaker-external factors (e.g. social information), as well as other factors, such as syllable structure and prosody.

Decades of empirical research have led to an increasingly nuanced picture of the nature of phonetic and phonological change, incorporating insights from speech production and perception, cognitive biases, and social factors. However, there remains a significant gap between observed patterns and proposed mechanisms, in part due to the difficulty of conducting the type of controlled studies necessary to test hypotheses about historical change. Computational and mathematical models provide an alternative means by which such hypotheses can be fruitfully explored.

The extent to which the spoken media (e.g. films and television) might have an impact on language variation and change in the community has been considered for some time within different areas of sociolinguistics. In this course we will consider the following:
- previous research on the influence of the media on spoken language
- methods and models of media influence within mass communications research
- the findings of a recent variationist study on the impact of engaging with TV soap dramas on phonological variation and change

The course has two goals. First, students will learn the Autosegmental-Metrical (AM) model of intonational phonology and how to transcribe intonational tones and prosodic structure using the English ToBI transcription system, and second, students will be introduced to a model of prosodic typology which is based on intonational phonology of various languages described in the same AM framework.

This course will examine the social aspects of phonetic variation, paying particular attention to the relationship between method and theory. The course will introduce students to the field through a survey of contemporary research, drawing on studies from variationist sociolinguistics, linguistic anthropology, and laboratory phonology. Basic methods for studying the production of different types of phonetic variables (vowels, consonants, voice quality, and prosody) will be introduced to give students the foundational tools for conducting sociophonetic work.

Existing theories about sound change focus either on the role of speakers or the role of listeners. However, members of a speech community are of course both speakers and listeners of their language. This course will investigate the relationship between the production and perception patterns of individual language users in ongoing sound changes. Questions such as the following will be considered: Do the production and perception patterns of an individual speaker change together, or does change in one modality precede that in the other modality?

For over 60 years, speech perception researchers have investigated listeners' ability to resolve the linguistic information encoded in input acoustic signals. More recent investigations have also explored listeners' resolution of the indexical information that is carried in the same signal. Both lines of study (and their important intersection) point toward the remarkable adaptability of perception. Listeners not only achieve perceptual stability across many types of variation, they also use that variation as important information about what a speaker is saying and about who said it.