Doing Phonetics with “Computer”:
Introducing Praat, and its Application to Phonology of English
‘Demola Jolayemi, PhD
Department of History and Languages
Elizade University
Ilara-Mokin, Ondo State
ABSTRACT
The global precept of massive movements of humans of diverse cultures, professions and languages has engendered, and engendering a unitary linguistic cooperation, adoption and adaptation. The accumulative aggregate of people’s choices from the Arabs to Chinese, Africans to the Caribbean is English. Thus, there is an aggressive effort to learn the language in order to acquire the functional proficiency prerequisite to their needs; which must be achieved with some measure of accuracy in order to meet the international acceptability and intelligibility. In these global movements and communication, the science of listening and speaking in English is of uttermost prominence. The objective of this paper is to introduce praat as computer software that can ease teaching phonetics, and how it can be used to teach the English phonology in a way as to make the teaching and learning engagements fun. This is achieved by a serialised content description of the computer program, how it is operated, and samples of its productions through the computer screen captures. Secondly, corpus of linguistic data comprising varieties of English are analysed with praat. The paper also presents how acoustic evidence provided by praat can be used to aid the English phonology class.
Keywords: acoustics, application, computer, phonetics, phonology, praat, software