In this series for The Accent Lab, we will be presenting an example each week (on Friday) of an unusual accent/dialect that speaks to the incredible diversity that can be found among native English speakers in how they produce the language. This week’s submission is from the Burghers of Sri Lanka.

For those of you who have difficulty with remembering the symbols of the IPA, or who are eager to drive that knowledge into your students, the UCL Division of Psychology & Language Sciences has created a very helpful application: Phonetic Flash.  Comprising a series of Flash-based activities, Phonetic Flash is designed to use games to help students become comfortable with phonetic symbols, their manners of articulation, and their use in words.  Here are the activities that they offer:

1. Labels: IPA Consonants - You see an IPA symbol and have to choose the correct voice, place, and manner labels.
2. Labels: English RP Consonants - You see an IPA symbol and have to choose the correct voice, place, and manner labels for Received Pronunciation.
   
3. Symbols: English RP Consonants - You see a label and have to choose the appropriate symbol for speakers of Received Pronunciation.
4. Words: English RP Vowels - You see a word and have to choose the appropriate symbol for Received Pronunciation.
5. Words: Northern British English Vowels - You see a word and have to choose an appropriate symbol for a speaker of Northern British English.
6. Hit & Miss: RP English - You see a symbol and a list of words. You have to choose the words which contain the sound symbolized for Received Pronunciation speakers.

Give these exercises a try and see if they can help you to build your knowledge-base in , and comfort with, basic phonetics.

In this series for The Accent Lab, we will be presenting an example each week (on Friday) of an unusual accent/dialect that speaks to the incredible diversity that can be found among native English speakers in how they produce the language. This week’s submission is from Bermuda.

As I discovered when producing The Accent Lab’s Phonemic Chart, learning to distinguish one vowel sound from another can be surprisingly tricky.  This is made even more complex when the difficulties of navigating phonemic notation are taken into account.

Nevertheless, there are few things more important for the student of accent reduction than learning how to distinguish between vowel sounds – there is hardly an accent which does not find at least one vowel pairing to be especially troubling.

EAC Echo is an iOS app that is aiming to make practicing vowel discernment easy, approachable, and surprisingly fun.  They do that by turning the process of learning the individual sounds and their notation into a game.

To get started, click on “Learn Vowels” and press on any of of the thirteen phonetic symbols to hear them being pronounced.  Once you feel like you have a firm grasp on those sounds, you can press “Start Game” and select four sounds that you would like to work on:

• 

  EAC Echo Game Play.

  Out of the following vowels – /i/ , /ɪ/ , /e/ , /ɛ/ , /æ/ , /u/ , /ʊ/ , /o/ , /ʌ/ , /ɑ/

• Out of the following dipthongs – /ɑɪ/ , /ɑʊ/ , /ɔɪ/

The game will display the four vowels’ phonetic symbols as Blue, Green, Yellow, and Red buttons (as on the right).  EAC Echo then plays one of those four modeled phonemes at random and you have to press on the matching phonetic symbol.

If you complete the first one successfully, it will then play two vowel sounds, one after the other, and you will have to press on the buttons in the sequence in which they were read.  Each time you get one right, it will reshuffle the sequence and add another sound. If you find it too simple or too challenging, you can adjust the settings to Easy, Medium, or Hard or just turn on/off the visual cues (the buttons can light up as the phonemes are being played).

Although a game like this can quickly/easily shift from being a way to learn something to just being a game, for a mere $0.99 it is worth giving it a try to see how it works for you.

In this series for The Accent Lab, we will be presenting an example each week (on Friday) of an unusual accent/dialect that speaks to the incredible diversity that can be found among native English speakers in how they produce the language. This week’s submission is from Samaná, Dominican Republic.