ABSTRACT In the past five years it has become possible to display and print phonetics and to manipulate phonetic data on small com- puters. The problem now is to integrate small computer tools to take best advantage of technological advances. This project will establish efficient methods for commercial software to enter, manipulate, analyze, and print phonetic data on American English from the Linguistic Atlas of the Middle and South Atlantic States (LAMSAS). The Principal Investigator has applied commercial software to display and print phonetic data, and has designed a data structure for phonetic data with a commercial database program. The 1.5 million responses of the LAMSAS data-base require fast, accurate methods to enter phonetic data, now difficult to keyboard. Efficient methods will be developed to divide extremely variable strings of phonetics into classes in order to correlate the classes (numerically coded) with the characteristics of LAMSAS informants with a commercial advanced statistics package. Finally, methods will be designed to integrate the output of word processing, database, and statistical software to generate camera-ready copy for publication. The methods will be of immediate use to linguists for research on phonetics because all equipment and software is readily available at low cost and all procedures are readily portable for database research.
