Phonetics Lane 332

PHONETICS is concerned with the systematic description of the physical properties of speech sounds. ARTICULATORY PHONETICS is one of the three major branches of phonetics. The other two branches are Acoustic Phonetics and Auditory Phonetics. Articulatory Phonetics studies the production of speech sounds and the way those sounds are made by the vocal organs. Acoustic Phonetics studies the sound waves which travel in the air. Auditory Phonetics studies the perception of speech waves by the listener's ears and brain. The three branches of phonetics make use of modern technology to investigate speech.  

 

            The terms vocal organs and speech organs are very common in current phonetic literature. But it should be pointed out that there is no part of a human being which is specifically created for talking. We assume that the parts of the body that produce the sounds of language are incidentally useful for this purpose, but they all have other duties to perform which, from the biological point of view, are older and more important-duties connected; for instance, with breathing, smelling, tasting, chewing, swallowing and other such activities.

1) The respiratory system which contains the lungs, the diaphragm and other muscles used to compress and dilate the lungs, the bronchial tubes in the lungs, and the trachea (the wind-pipe).

 

(2) The phonatory system which is composed of the larynx (the voice-box) which contains the vocal cords.

 

(3) The articulatory system which is composed of the oral cavity (that is the mouth) with its organs, including especially the teeth, the palate and the tongue, and the nasal cavity. 

 

            How are speech sounds made? In nearly all speech sounds, the basic source of power is the respiratory system that pushes air out of the lungs. Generally, and in all languages, people speak with the air stream being exhaled, i.e. breathed out from the lungs. Air from the lungs goes up the windpipe (the trachea) and into then the larynx, at which point it must pass between the vocal cords which are two small muscular folds.

            If the vocal cords are apart, as they normally are when breathing out, the air from the lungs will have a relatively free passage into the pharynx and the mouth. But if the vocal cords are adjusted so that there is only a narrow passage between them (we call the passage the glottis), the air stream will cause them to vibrate and move rapidly. Sounds produced when the vocal cords are vibrating are voiced and sounds produced when the vocal cords are not vibrating are voiceless. Any language must use both types of sounds, but their number varies from one language to the other.

            How can we recognize the difference between voiced and voiceless sounds? In order to hear the difference between a voiced and a voiceless sound, try to say a long [v] sound. Now compare this with a long [f] sound, saying each of them alternately. Both of these sounds are formed in the same way in the mouth. The difference between them is that [v] is voiced but [f] is voiceless. You can feel the vocal fold vibrations in [v] if you put your fingertips on your larynx. You can also hear the buzzing of the vibrations in [v] if you block your ears while contrasting [fffffvvvvv].

            The difference between voiced and voiceless sounds is often important in distinguishing sounds that give words with different meanings. In each of the pairs fat, vat; thigh, thy; Sue, zoo; buy, pie; seal, zeal; down, town; came, game; ice, eyes the first consonant in the first word is voiceless, whereas in the second is voiced (you have to consider that we are referring to the pronunciation of words and not to their spellings). Words like these are called minimal pairs (i.e. two words which are identical in all sounds except for one sound in the same position)

English Consonants=24 Consonants

Stops=Plosives=Explosives

 

Sound	Place of Articulation	Manner of Articulation	voicing
/b/ e.g. boy	Bilabial	Stop/plosive	Voiced
/p/ e.g. pen	Bilabial	Stop/plosive	Voiceless
/d/ e.g. dog	Alveolar	Stop/plosive	Voiced
/t/ e.g. team	Alveolar	Stop/plosive	Voiceless
/g/ e.g. game	Velar	Stop/plosive	Voiced
/k/ e.g. key	Velar	Stop/plosive	Voiceless

 

Fricatives

Sound	Place of Articulation	Manner of Articulation	voicing
/f/ e.g. film	Labio-dental	Fricative	Voiceless
/v/ e.g. video	Labio-dental	Fricative	Voiced
/θ/ e.g. thin	Dental	Fricative	Voiceless
/ð/ e.g. this	Dental	Fricative	Voiced
/ʃ/ e.g. shark	Palato-alveolar	Fricative	Voiceless
/ʒ / e.g. rouge	Palato-alveolar	Fricative	Voiced
/s / e.g. seem	Alveolar	Fricative	Voiceless
/z/ e.g. zoo	Alveolar	Fricative	Voiced
/h/  e.g. hat	Glottal	Fricative	Voiceless

 

Lateral

Sound	Place of Articulation	Manner of Articulation	voicing
/l/ e.g. loud	Alveolar	Lateral	Voiced

 

 

Nasals

Sound	Place of Articulation	Manner of Articulation	voicing
/m/ e.g. mouth	Bilabial	Nasal	Voiced
/n/ e.g. new	Alveolar	Nasal	Voiced
/ŋ/ e.g. king	Velar	Nasal	Voiced

 

Affricates

Sound	Place of Articulation	Manner of Articulation	voicing
/ ʧ / e.g. chair	Palato-Alveolar	Affricate	Voiceless
/ ʤ / e.g. judge	Palato-Alveolar	Affricate	Voiced

 

Glides

Sound	Place of Articulation	Manner of Articulation	voicing
/r/ e.g. right	Alveolar	Glide /Frictionless continuant	Voiced
/j/ e.g. yard	Palatal	Glide/ Semi-vowel	Voiced
/w/ e.g. wing	Bilabial / Velar	Glide/ Semi-vowel	Voiced

 

English Vowels

Simple Vowels (monphthongs)= 12 vowels

Front vowels

Sound	Example
/iː/	Seem, seek, leek, feel
/e/	Ten, pen, hen
/ɪ/	Sit, hit, fit, kill
/æ/	Hat, cat, map, rat

 

Central Vowels

Sound	Example
/ə/	About, teacher, writer
/ʌ/	Luck, duck, suck
/3ː/	Bird, third , heard, learn

 

Back Vowels

Sound	Example
/uː/	Tool, moon, cool
/ʊ/	Put, could, should, wood
/ɔː/	Horse, course, horn
/ɑː/	Farm, hard, car, harm
/ɒ/	Top, not hot

 

English Diphthongs=8 Diphthongs

Front Diphthongs

Sound	Example
/eɪ/	Day, make, hay
/aɪ /	High, light, might
/ɔɪ /	Boy, coin, soil

 

 

Central Diphthongs

Sound	Example
/eə /	Fair, hair, there
/ɪə/	Clear, hear, tear
/ ʊə /	Sure, poor

 

Back  Diphthongs

Sound	Example
/aʊ /	Cow, how, now, loud
/əʊ/	Know, tone, so

 

 

 

 

Place of Articulation:

1- Bilabial

(Made with the two lips.) Say words such as 'pie, buy, my' and note how the lips come together for the first sound in each of these words. Find a comparable set of words with bilabial sounds at the end.

2- Labiodental

(Lower lip and upper front teeth.) Most people, when saying words such as 'fie, vie', raise the lower lip until it nearly touches the upper front teeth.

3- Dental

(Tongue tip/blade and upper front teeth.) Say the words 'thigh, thy'. Both these kinds of sounds are normal in English, and both may be called dental.

4- Alveolar

(Tongue tip/blade and the alveolar ridge.) Again there are two possibilities in English, and you should find out which you use. You may pronounce words such as 'tie, die, nigh, sigh, zeal, lie' using the tip of the tongue or the blade of the tongue. Feel how you normally make the alveolar consonants in each of these words, and then try to make them in the other way. A good way to appreciate the difference between dental and alveolar sounds is to say 'ten' and 'tenth' (or 'n' and 'nth'). Which n is farther back? (Most people make the one in the first of each of these pairs of words on the alveolar ridge and the second as a dental sound with the tongue touching the upper front teeth.)

5- Retroflex

(Tongue tip and the back of the alveolar ridge.) Many speakers of English do not use retroflex sounds at all. But for some, retroflex sounds occur initially in words such as 'rye, row, ray'. Note the position of the tip of your tongue in these words. Speakers who pronounce r at the ends of words may also have retroflex sounds with the tip of the tongue raised in 'ire, hour, air'.

6- Palato-Alveolar (or alveo-palatal)

(Tongue blade and the back of the alveolar ridge.) Say words such as 'shy, she, show'. During the consonants, the tip of your tongue may be down behind the lower front teeth, or it may be up near the alveolar ridge, but the blade of the tongue is always close to the back part of the alveolar ridge. Because these sounds are made further back in the mouth than those in 'sigh, sea, sew', they can also be called post-alveolar. You should be able to pronounce them with the tip/blade of the tongue.

7. Palatal

(Front of the tongue and hard palate.) Say the word 'you' very slowly so that you can isolate the consonant at the beginning. If you say this consonant by itself, you should be able to feel that the front of the tongue is raised toward the hard palate (but there is no contact between the articulators). Try to hold the consonant position and breathe inward through the mouth. You will probably feel the rush of cold air between the front of the tongue and the hard palate.

8. Velar

(Back of the tongue and soft palate.) The consonants that have the farthest back place of articulation in English are those that occur at the end of 'hack, hag, hang'. In all these sounds, the back of the tongue is raised so that it touches the velum. It should also be mentioned that certain sounds, such as /w/, may be classified both as bilabial and velar.

9. Glottal

This place of articulation refers to the vocal cords and, more specifically, to the glottis (the space between the vocal cords). This kind of articulation is made when the vocal cords allow a small space for the air stream to pass between them.

Manner of Articulation:

1. Stop (Plosive)

 (Complete or full closure of the articulators involved so that the air stream cannot escape through the mouth before it is suddenly released causing a small burst). There are two possible types of stop.

2. Fricative

(Close approximation of two articulators so that the air stream is partially obstructed and turbulent airflow is produced.) The mechanism involved in making these slightly hissing sounds may be likened to that involved when the wind whistles around a corner. The consonants in 'fie, vie' (labiodental), 'thigh, thy' (dental), 'sigh, zoo' (alveolar), and 'shy' (alveo-palatal) are examples of fricative sounds.

3. Approximant

 (An articulation in which one articulator is close to another, but without the vocal tract being narrowed to such an extent that a turbulent air stream is produced.) In saying the first sound in 'yacht,' the front of the tongue is raised toward the palatal area of the roof of the mouth, but it does not come close enough for a fricative sound to be produced. The consonants in the word 'we' (approximation between the lips and in the velar region) and, for some people, in the word 'raw' (approximation in the alveolar region) are also examples of approximants. Approximants are sometimes called glides or semi-vowels.

 

4.  Lateral (Approximant)

(Obstruction of the air stream at a point along the center of the oral tract, with incomplete closure between one or both sides of the tongue and the roof of the mouth.) Say the word 'lie' and note how the tongue touches near the center of the alveolar ridge. Prolong the initial consonant and note how, despite the closure formed by the tongue, air flows out freely, over the side of the tongue.

5. Trill

It might be useful to know the terms trill (also called roll) and tap (or flap). Tongue-tip trills occur in some forms of Scottish English in words like 'rye' and 'raw'. Trills are described as intermittent sounds because of the repetitive nature of its production where several contacts are made between articulators. Taps, in which the tongue makes a single tap against the alveolar ridge, occur in the middle of a word such as 'pity' in many forms of American English.

6. Affricate

The production of some sounds involves more than one of these manners of articulation. Say the word 'cheap' (which is quite different from 'sheep') and think about how you make the first sound. At the beginning, the tongue comes up to make contact with the back part of the alveolar ridge to form a stop closure (note that the alveo-palatal area rather than the beginning of the alveolar ridge is the one used). This contact is the slackened that there is a fricative at the same place of articulation. This kind of combination of a stop and a fricative is called an affricate; in this case an alveo-palatal affricate.  

 

            Speech sounds are divided into consonants and vowels. In the production of vowel sounds, the articulators do not come very close together as with consonants, and the passage of the air stream is relatively unobstructed (a relatively free air passage). Vowel sounds may be specified in terms of the position of the highest point of the tongue and the position of the lips. In other words, vowels can be described in terms of three factors: (1) the height of the body of the tongue; (2) the front-back position of the tongue (the tongue centre is also important); and (3) the degree of lip rounding.

            It is very difficult to become aware of the position of the tongue in vowels, but you can probably get some impression of tongue height by observing the position of your jaw while saying just the vowels in the four words, 'heed, hid, head, had'.

 

            Vowels and consonants can be thought of as the segments of which speech is composed. Together they form the syllables, which go to make up utterances. Superimposed on the syllables are other features known as suprasegmentals. These include variations in stress and pitch. Variations in length are also usually considered to be suprasegmental features, although they can affect single segments as well as whole syllables.

 

            Variations in stress are used in English to distinguish between a noun (or adjective) and a verb, as in '(an) insult' versus '(to) insult'. Say these words yourself, and check which syllable has the greater stress. You should find that in the nouns the stress is on the first syllable, but in the verbs it is on the last. Thus, stress can have a grammatical function in some English words. It can also be used for contrastive emphasis (as in I want a red pen, not a black one).

            In order to understand what we normally transcribe and what we do not, it is necessary to understand the basic principles of phonology. Phonology and phonetics are actually interrelated fields since both study speech sounds. However, phonology is concerned with the systems and patterns of sounds that occur in a language. It studies a language to determine its distinctive (significant) sounds and to find out which sounds convey a difference in meaning.

            When two sounds differentiate words, they are said to belong to different phonemes. There must be a phonemic difference if two words (such as 'white' and 'right' or 'cat' and 'bat') differ in only a single sound.

            We cannot rely on the spelling to tell us whether two sounds are members of different phonemes. For example, if you think about the two words 'key' and 'car', you realize that they both begin with the same sound, despite the fact that one is spelled with the letter k and the other with the letter c.

 

British and American English:

            We will consider one form of British English and one form of American English. The major difference between the two is that speakers of American English pronounce [r] sounds in all positions, whereas the English do not pronounce the /r/ sound if it is followed by a consonant (e.g. farm, learn, hard…etc) or if it occurs at the end of the word (if not followed by a vowel).

Aspiration:

            Most people have very little aspiration going on while the lips are closed during 'pie'. In 'pie', after the release of the lip closure, there is a moment of aspiration (a puff of air), a period of voicelessness after the stop articulation and before the beginning of the voicing for the following vowel. If you put your hand in front of your lips while saying 'pie', you can feel the burst of air that comes out during the period of voicelessness after the release of the stop.

         In a narrow transcription, aspiration may be indicated by a small raised h, [h]. Accordingly, these words may be transcribed as [p^haí, t^haí, k^haít]. You may not be able to feel the burst of air in 'tie'

      Therefore, a phoneme is not a single sound but a name for a group of sounds. There is a group of k sounds, t sounds and a group of l sounds that occur in English. It is as if you had in your mind an ideal k, t or l, and the ones that were actually produced were variations of it, which differed in small ways that did not affect the meaning of English words.

Weak Forms:

            The form in which a word is pronounced when it is considered in isolation is called its citation form. At least one syllable is fully stressed and has no reduc­tion of the vowel quality. But in connected speech, many changes take place. Some smaller words such as 'and, to, him' may be considerably altered. They will usually be completely unstressed, the vowel may be reduced or may disappear altogether, and one or more of the consonants may be dropped or altered. Thus 'and' in its reduced form may be pronounced as [énd] or [én] or [n]. Try to pronounce it in these three different ways in a phrase such as bread and butter.

Many words are like 'and' in that they seldom maintain their citation form in conversational speech. These words have two different forms of pronunciation. There is a strong form, which occurs when the word is stressed, as in sentences such as I want money and happiness, not money or happiness.

Intonation:

            The intonation of a sentence is the pattern of pitch changes that occurs. The part of a sentence over which a particular pattern extends is called an intona­tional phrase.. The line above the sentence shows the pitch changes that occurred when this sentence was produced by a speaker of American English. The positioning of the individual words above this line gives an indication of their relative timing.   

           

 

Summary

1-      In English, we have 26 letters but 44 sounds (24 consonants and 20 vowels=12 simple vowels and 8 diphthongs).

2-      All English sounds are oral (produced by the mouth or more specifically by the oral cavity), except for three nasal sounds (produced by the nose or more specifically by the nasal cavity).

3-      All vowels are oral and voiced.

4-      Accents of English differ more greatly in the vowels than in the consonants.

5-      The palate is divided into the alveolar ridge, the hard palate and the soft palate.

6-      The tongue is the most important organ of speech. The tip and blade of the tongue are the most mobile parts. Behind the blade is the front of the tongue which is actually the forward part of the body of the tongue, and it lies underneath the hard palate when the tongue is at rest. The remainder of the body of the tongue may be divided into the center, which is beneath the palate (the hard and the soft); the back, which is beneath the soft palate

7-      Human beings have two vocal cords.

8-      Just behind the upper teeth is a small protuberance that you can feel with your tongue tip. This is called the alveolar ridge. You can also feel that the front part of the roof of the mouth is formed by a bony, hard and stationary structure. This is called the hard palate which is the highest part of the palate, coming between the alveolar ridge and the beginning of the soft palate (or the velum).