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Analytic Listening
AL consists of two sets of exercises. Unit 1 deals with the voicing of consonants and aspiration of plosives. Unit 2 deals with manner of articulation for consonants. In the earlier questions in each unit, all the items in a question are spoken by the same speaker. In later questions, different items are produced by different speakers. Click on the AL logo in the top left of any question screen to see a summary of your current score for the unit. The adjusted score takes account of the fact that you may get some items right by chance. Notice that it is possible to obtain a negative adjusted score. This means that the performance is worse than would be expected by chance. The record of your scores is stored in a transient cookie. If your browser is not set to accept "per session" cookies, then this feature will not work. The cookie is not stored permanently on your hard disk. It disappears when you close your browser. You may attempt the questions in any order you wish, but AL will not allow you to attempt a question more than once in a single session. You must close your web browser before the record of attempted questions (and the score summary) is deleted.
If you get an item wrong, it is a good idea to listen to it again and to look at the diagrams on the details page for that question. The details page contains a phonetic transcription of each item, a phonetic label for each item (where relevant) and a diagram consisting of the speech pressure waveform for the utterance or part of it and for some items a spectrogram of the utterance or part of it. AL works on Microsoft Internet Explorer 4+ and Netscape 4+ The exercises were written and recorded by Michael Ashby (UCL), Patricia Ashby (University of Westminster) and John Maidment (UCL). The sound engineer was Steve Nevard with assistance from Eva Estebas. Site design, JavaScript programming and sound editing by John Maidment. The speech pressure waveform and spectrogram diagrams were produced using WASP written by Mark Huckvale. Tooltips script by Mike McGrath and Dynamic Drive with minor modifications by John Maidment. Analytic Listening is a product of the SIPhTrA project, funded by HEFCE/DENI FDTL. All text, sound and images are © Department of Phonetics & Linguistics, University College London, July 2000. While we are happy to receive comments and suggestions about AL, we cannot undertake to answer any questions about the exercises or any other aspect of the site. |