Can music help you learn language? This episode features a special guest interview with Sami Halabi, CEO & Founder of the Univoice app which teaches its users languages through song! Sami talks about his experience being multilingual, how he taught himself and others pronunciation and grammar skills through singing, and how rhythm and music can strengthen our brain's ability to learn language. You can learn more about the app at univoice.app and you can learn how to support the app's current fundraiser at: https://wefunder.com/univoice

This episode of Hooked is about how vowels are made (the basic articulation of vowels) and special properties of how vowels sound (acoustics of vowels). Maxwell Hope and Average Joe make use of vowels when discussing dialects and dialectal differences. There is also a special guest interview with Dreams, a native Arabic speaker and linguistics student.

In this episode of Hooked, Maxwell recaps his experience at the 2019 International Congress of Phonetic Sciences and then plays three small interviews from the conference with researchers Maria Del Saz who speaks about a variety of Spanish and an interesting sound change currently happening, Matt Carroll who talks about prenasilization (what does THAT mean?) of voiceless stops in an underdocumented language, and Indranil Dutta & Charlie Redmon who give us a look into a rare three-way coronal stop contrast (listen to get an idea of what this is!). We want to thank those we interviewed as well as the amazing organizers of the 2019 ICPhS conference.

If you want to learn more about ICPhS you can visit their website here

Don't stop me now!

What's the difference bettween a "p" and a "b" sound? What's that thing called behind your upper teeth? Did you know you can make a complete closure at the vocal folds to produce a sound? In Episode 2 of Hooked, Maxwell gives an introduction of the sounds classified as "stops" or "plosives". He talks about articulators involved and the ways to categorize stops based on voicing and place of articulation. Average Joe tries his best to create a stop with "prevoicing". Finally, Maxwell addresses a huge "paradox" of stop production and introduces linguistics graduate student and Bengali native speaker, Sree, who walks us through the fascinating four way stop contrast of Bengali stops.

Interactive IPA chart for reference: http://www.ipachart.com/

In this episode Maxwell Hope will go over some of the basics of phonetics, including the definition of phonetics, describing what an articulator is, and explaining phonation.

Average Joe will ask about rolling r's and demonstrates his ability to roll his r's.