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If you've taken phonetics, you know that linguistics gives us a way to
talk about and organize the sounds of the world's languages. But how do
we actually hear those sounds? What are our ears and brains doing that
allow us to be so delicately attuned to what is essentially the way
someone else's mouth is moving?
In Linguistics 146 (Auditory Phonetics) we will take a look at these
questions. This course combines a bit of several fields --- the physics
of sound, the anatomy of the ear, the psychology of perception, and the
neural structure of our brains --- to give us an understanding of how we
hear. Some of this will be about hearing in general, and some will
focus on how we perceive linguistic sounds specifically. Along the way
we'll have some fun with "auditory illusions" that may make you question
your own senses.
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