Phonetics

Phonetics

The study of the perception and production of speech sounds

Articulatory Phonetics

The study of how speech sounds are produced

Acoustic Phonetics

The study of acoustic characteristics of speech sounds

Vowel

A speech sound in which the oral and pharyngeal cavities are not constricted enough to cause audible friction. Tone color categories used in speech, primarily created by the tone colors of the harmonics being featured by the first two resonances of the vocal tract and radiated as the first two formants. Vowel intelligibility is reduced at high fundamental frequencies because harmonics of the source, being widely spaced, do not adequately populate and energize the first two vocal tract resonances.

Rounded vowels

Vowels in which the lips are rounded, pursed, or protruded

Unrounded vowels

Vowels in which lips are not rounded, pursed, or protruded, and may even be slightly retracted

Allophone

A specific phoneme is not a single, invariant sound. Rather, it is a class of sounds that all serve the same linguistic function. The members of a single such class are called allophones and are phonetic variants of a phoneme. Allophones do not change the meaning of a word. (i.e. variant pronunciations of the same phoneme)

Example 1: The words “key” (English) “qui” (French) and “coo” both begin with the same phoneme /k/. However, this phoneme is produced a little farther back in the mouth for “coo” than for “key/qui.” This results in slightly different acoustic properties for each production. Listeners, however, would hear the two sounds as the same phoneme and would not notice the acoustic differences.

Example 2: The final sound in the word “pop” has two allophones. 1) releasing the lip closure and allowing a burst of air to produce a slight turbulent sound, or 2) the lip closure is not released and no audible burst of air is produced.

Diphthong

A diphthong is a sound formed by the combination of two vowels in a single syllable, in which the sound begins as one vowel and moves toward another (as in coin, loud, and side).

Morpheme

The smallest unit of language that carries a semantic meaning. Example: cat is a single morpheme, cats contains two morphemes (cat+s)

Phoneme

A basic sound segment that has the linguistic function of distinguishing morphemes. Example: each of the words “cat mat fat rat bat pat vat hat” is a single morpheme and varies only in the initial phoneme. Thus, each morpheme in this list is contrasted from the others by the initial sound segments.

The five functional divisions of the tongue surface

Tip: Portion of the tongue that is closest to the front teeth at rest

Blade: Tongue region just posterior to the tip and inferior to the alveolar ridge of the maxilla dorsum

The Maxilla Dorsum: Tongue region posterior to the blade and below the back part of the hard palate