LearnIPA: A smartphone application designed to assist in the study of the International Phonetic Alphabet

The International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) is an organizational system of symbols that represent the sounds of spoken language. The IPA is a fundamental tool for language learners and students of linguistics and communication disorders. To make learning the IPA more accessible and practicable for students, I have designed LearnIPA, a smartphone application which features an interactive soundboard consisting of the vowels and consonants of the American English portion of the IPA. In addition to the soundboard, I have scripted a question feature, which tests the user’s ability to recognize distinct sounds in English words, and a flashcard feature, which tests the user’s ability to transcribe English words phonetically. The app is designed to teach users how to trust their ears and disassociate speech sounds from conventional letters. Designed with Unity development technology, programmed with C#, and populated with recordings from the Wikimedia Commons free media repository, LearnIPA is intended to serve as a resource for learners to gain practice with the concepts of phonetics and phonology.

In this presentation, I will outline the steps involved in the creation process ofLearnIPA, justify the organizational system used for the soundboard, and describe how the flashcard and question features substantiate the distinction between IPA symbols and English letters. To accompany the discussion, I will include a demonstration of the application features.