Book Description

This handbook presents the first systematic account of corpus phonology - the employment of corpora, especially purpose-built phonological corpora of spoken language, for studying speakers' and listeners' acquisition and knowledge of the sound system of their native languages and the principles underlying those systems. The field combines methods and theoretical approaches from phonology, both diachronic and synchronic, phonetics, corpus linguistics, speech technology, information technology and computer science, mathematics and statistics. The book is divided into four parts: the first looks at the design, compilation, and use of phonological corpora, while the second looks at specific applications, including examples from French and Norwegian phonology, child phonological development, and second language acquisition. Part 3 looks at the tools and methods used, such as Praat and EXMARaLDA, and the final part examines a number of currently available phonological corpora in various languages, including LANCHART, LeaP, and IViE. It will appeal not only to those working with phonological corpora, but also to researchers and students of phonology and phonetics more generally, as well as to all those interested in language variation, dialectology, first and second language acquisition, and sociolinguistics.