fənɝdl : A Game to Teach Place, Manner, and Voice of Articulation

Abstract

We have seen a noticeable lack of understanding amongst undergraduate CSD students in upper-level courses when recalling information on how speech sounds are made by mouth. We developed a game to reinforce knowledge about the articulation of speech sounds. We are expecting this game, used in class as a brain warm-up, to reinforce previous knowledge which is necessary for graduate school and a career as a speech-language pathologist or audiologist. To play the game, the course professor will give each student a black notecard and display a prompt (ex. “she __ about phonetics.”). Each student will identify a word that fills in the blank based on syntactic constraints. Students will identify sounds and write down the place, voice, and manner of articulation for each sound in the word (e.g., voiceless, interdental, fricative for the “th” sound in “thinks”). When finished, students exchange their work with another and identify the phonetic symbols for all sounds described. This game will be played weekly for the remainder of the semester, and we will analyze the collected data at the end of the semester.