Week 1 Phonetics/Phonology

What are acoustic phonetics?

Analysis of speech sounds according to variation in air pressure

What are articulatory phonetics?

Analysis of speech sounds according to articulators

What is phonology?

The representation and categorisation of speech sounds in the mind

What is speech? (Acoustics)

Speech is sound - Sound are pressure waves that propagate through the air to our ears

What do sound waves have?

Amplitude and Frequency

What is amplitude?

Loudness

What is frequency?

Pitch, measured in Hertz - Higher the pitch, higher the frequency.

What are periodic waves?

Regular pattern, found in voiced sounds

What are aperiodic waves?

Irregular pattern, found in voiceless sounds.

How is speech produced?

Air is pushed pulmonically from the lungs - Air needs to be vibrated to generate sound so it happens through the vocal folds - This is then filtered egressively, through the supralaryngeal vocal tract and out through the mouth and/or nose.

How does voicing occur?

Air causes the vocal folds to vibrate between open and closed positions.

How do we produce different speech sounds?

By constricting the airstream in specific ways with our vocal tract

What is a syllable?

Shortest stretch of speech that can be pronounced naturally, usually a combination of consonants and vowels.

What is a segment?

Individual speech sounds that make up syllables.

How are consonants produced?

Constriction of the vocal tract.

How are vowels produced?

Open vocal tract

What are the principles of the IPA?

Transcribe only linguistic significant information - Each symbol corresponds to a distinct segment or speech sound - Covers all speech sounds of all spoken languages.