HOW TO PREPARE FOR AN EXAM
NOTE: A few semesters ago I got an email from a phonetics student who had a question about
some text from the lecture on branches of phonetics ('intro.ppt'). That text is copied below. My
response to the student appears beneath. I answered the question, then followed this up with
some more general advice about how to prepare for exams. The student found this advice to be
helpful, so I hung onto it. You may or may not find the advice useful, but it can't hurt.]
----------------What are the relationships between speech movements and the acoustic properties of the speech
signal?
When the tongue moves from a position high in the mouth to a position lower in the mouth,
how does the sound pattern change (and why)?
----------------The main purpose of the lecture on branches of phonetics was just that – to explain what kinds
of questions are studied in the four major branches of phonetics. The text you were asking
about, taken from one of the slides, explains the sort of question that is pursued in acoustic
phonetics (also known as speech acoustics), one of the four branches that we talked about.
Beneath the question ("What are the relationships ...") was one specific example of this: What
happens to the acoustic pattern when the tongue drops from a high position to a lower position?
Slide 6 [note that the slide numbers may have changed since this note was written] answers that
question with spectrograms of [ba], [da], and [ga] (spoken twice). The vocal tract is opening in
all three cases, but starting from three different places (the lips, alveolar ridge, and velum). The
formant patterns for the three speech sounds are different, but in all three cases the first formant
(F1) increases in frequency when the vocal tract opens. So that's the answer to that particular
question – when the vocal tract opens, F1 rises in frequency. (We did not discuss why this
occurs.) But that detail was intended as an illustration of the kind of problem that is addressed
in acoustic phonetics. Other examples are given in the other slides in this section of the notes.
The moral of all of the examples is that one major goal of speech acoustics is to understand the
relationships that exist between articulation and sound. I would encourage you to look through
those slides again with this idea in mind.
General advice on exam preparation
In terms of what you should be doing to prepare for an exam, the question you asked is a
perfect example of exactly what you ought to be doing: Go through the slides and, for every
slide, or every collection of slides on the same topic, ask yourself what point is being made.
Why am I telling you this stuff? Put yourself in my position and ask yourself, if you were
making up the exam, what kind of question might you ask about this slide or collection of slides
on a single theme? It's not important to be able to guess the exact question, but this exercise in
mind reading is extremely useful. This is exactly what I and almost all teachers do when we put
exams together – we go through the lecture notes (and the text), notice that there is material
explaining, for example, the difference between descriptive and prescriptive grammar, or the
distinction between phoneme categories and allophones, and try to come up with an exam item
that would be able to determine whether a student understood the point that was being made
(and, depending on the nature of the question, was capable of explaining the concept clearly
and accurately). This way of approaching exam preparation should work well for all of your
courses, not just phonetics. I gave the example of looking through the lecture notes, but the
same is true for the material in your textbook, and for the lecture notes that you take in class.
The lecture notes that are posted on my web site are the most important source of study
material, though.
Just to be sure this is clear, let's take one more example. In 'language.ppt', slides 33-36 [the
slide numbers may have changed, but you should not have trouble finding the text that is being
discussed] all address the same point about the difference between phonology and phonetics or,
to put it another way, the difference between phoneme categories and allophonic variants of
that category. In what way do the examples that are given illustrate this point? What does this
have to do with the terms "underlying representation" and "surface phonetic form"? How do the
four versions of /p/ on slide 35 illustrate this point? From slide 37, how can you tell whether
two phonetically different speech sounds are allophones of the same phoneme category or
separate phonemes? What does all of this have to do with the status of nasalized and nonnasalized vowels in English versus French?
One last point about exam preparation will be a familiar one: I believe that the general approach
that I’m recommending here is a good one, but it will not work very well at all if you do not
begin trying to learn the concepts that are being taught until an exam date is announced. We
talked about this on the first day of class. The problem is a very simple one: if you do not learn
things as they are taught you will usually find that there is too much to learn and too little time
to learn it. There may be some students who can get by this way, but not many.