The Lexicon and Its Features
MIT OpenCourseWare offers this advanced linguistics course on the sound categories that make up the lexicon of human languages. It covers distinctive features that distinguish speech sounds across the world's languages, along with theories linking those categories to their acoustic and articulatory correlates, both universally and in specific languages. The course also examines models of how listeners recognize words, drawing on phonological structure and feature-based representations. Material is framed from multiple angles, including electrical engineering, linguistics, and cognitive science, reflecting MIT's cross-departmental approach to speech and language research. As with other MIT OCW offerings, the course provides lecture notes and readings for self-study, free of charge, with no certificate attached. It suits learners with some prior background in linguistics or acoustics who want a technical grounding in phonetics and word recognition.