Put them on the road to not Dislike Some Linguists
December 14, 2009 10:16 AM Subscribe
Good linguistics video or interactive links to show to high schoolers.
Asking for DH and his foray into linguistics in his HS Anthro class.
I already have a good interactive IPA (Paul Meier's), so that the kids can hear the sounds that aren't used, or used so much, in Standard American English. This has a good British/American diph- and triphthong area, too.
However, my husband is on the lookout for clips he saw on an unnamed show that did some sort of demonstration of variations in phonemes, where they moved in increments from one phoneme (that a speaker of English would recognize) to another, but covered a number of variations in between. I am not really sure what he is talking about. I showed him a clip of the McGurk Effect-- not what he means.
...His main thing here is to show students that, yes, other languages recognize different phonemes that we would all lump together under /p/, for instance.
Any other suggestions for cool things to look at for high school students would be greatly appreciated. Anything at all.
Thanks in advance!
Asking for DH and his foray into linguistics in his HS Anthro class.
I already have a good interactive IPA (Paul Meier's), so that the kids can hear the sounds that aren't used, or used so much, in Standard American English. This has a good British/American diph- and triphthong area, too.
However, my husband is on the lookout for clips he saw on an unnamed show that did some sort of demonstration of variations in phonemes, where they moved in increments from one phoneme (that a speaker of English would recognize) to another, but covered a number of variations in between. I am not really sure what he is talking about. I showed him a clip of the McGurk Effect-- not what he means.
...His main thing here is to show students that, yes, other languages recognize different phonemes that we would all lump together under /p/, for instance.
Any other suggestions for cool things to look at for high school students would be greatly appreciated. Anything at all.
Thanks in advance!
Hm, he might want to try looking for videos of infant language development studies. I seem to recall seeing a cool video in which infants were able to differentiate between what sounded (to my native-English-speaker ears) like completely identical sounds. At a certain age babies start to learn the phonemic groupings of their native language(s), but until that point they are capable of noticing all of the extremely nuanced phonological differences between sounds.
posted by pluckemin at 1:04 PM on December 14, 2009
posted by pluckemin at 1:04 PM on December 14, 2009
I would search the term "Categorical Perception". The McGurk Effect specifically has to do with synthesizing audio and video, but categorical perception refers to the idea that we tend to perceive phonemes along a continuum as either one end or the other, rather than "in between".
posted by freezer cake at 1:10 PM on December 14, 2009
posted by freezer cake at 1:10 PM on December 14, 2009
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Your DH's class might enjoy watching the documentary film The Linguists, about two linguists who go around the world to document and study dying languages. The film is only about an hour long and quite fascinating. The film covers their travels to several countries, including Siberia and India.
More info about the film here: http://thelinguists.com/
and the entire thing can be streamed here: http://www.babelgum.com/3016880/the-linguists.html
posted by fantine at 11:41 AM on December 14, 2009