Topics for the Midterm Paper

Instructions: Complete your written paper in no more than three pages of A4 sheets (typed with doubled spaces). The paper is due on August 5 (Tuesday).

1. Compare sound sample 1 with the sound you record by yourself and see what similarities and differences you can find. You can make different sound samples by yourself to see what you can do to make your own sound samples “sound” closer to sound sample 1 made by a native speaker. When you see the spectrograms or frequencies, don’t forget to consider gender differences or individual differences. You also need to “cut and paste” the “charts” of frequencies or spectrograms to the paper you are to hand in to me.

Sound sample 1: The woman cooked food for the two poor tourists.

2. In sound sample 2. one native speaker pronounce a sound containing consonants of a certain features. Can you figure out what features are they? When you make your own sound sample with the same contents, can you locate the similarities and differences between the two samples? If you are asked to improve your own sound sample, what will you do to achieve the goal?

Sound sample 2: He bought a boat and put it on the cold shore.