Phonetics

Phonetics

• studying the inventory and structure of the sounds of speech

  • articulatory phonetics

Articulatory Phonetics

• focus on how speech sounds are produced

• analysis of the physiological mechanisms of speech production

  • looks at tongue, lips, teeth, velum, vocal cords

  • places and manners of articulation

• data type: Human anatomy and movement

• concerned with speaker behaviour

Acoustic Phonetics

• focus on what speech sounds physically are

• studies the sound waves produced by speech

• measures: frequency, amplitude, duration, formants

• data type: waveforms and spectrograms

• concerned with signal properties

IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet)

• orthography or spelling does not necessarily represent the sounds of the language in a consistent way:

  • so we need a system for sound

Sound Producing System

• lungs

• larynx

• glottis

Lungs

• taking air into the lungs and expelling it

Larynx

(voice box/Adam’s apple)

• box-like structure made of cartilage and muscle

  • passageway

Glottis

(vocal folds)

• wide open — voiceless sounds

• closed but not tightly — voiced sounds

• whisper: front anterior portions pulled closed together, back portions are apart — voiceless sounds

• murmur: vocal folds allow enough air to pass — voiced sounds

Consonant Sounds

• there is some form of restriction or closure in the vocal tract that impedes airflow from the lungs

Consonants — Place of Articulation

• involves where in the vocal tract the airflow restriction occurs

  • bilabial

  • labiodental

  • interdental

  • alveolar

  • alveopalatal

  • velar

  • uvular

  • pharyngeal

  • glottal

Bilabial Consonant Sounds

• [p]

• [b]

• [m]

Labiodental Consonant Sounds

• [f]

• [v]

Inter(dental)

• [θ]

• [ð]

Alveolar

• [t]

• [d]

• [n]

• [s]

• [z]

• [l]

• [r]

(Alveo)palatal

• [ʃ]

• [ʒ]

• [tʃ]

• [dʒ]

• [j]

Velar

• [k]

• [g]

• [ŋ]

Uvular

• [r] french

• [q] arabic

Pharyngeal

• [h] arabic

Glottal

• [h]

• [ʔ]

Consonants — Manner of Articulation

• Stops (Plosives)

• Fricatives

• Affricates

• Liquids

• Glides

Oral Sounds

• velum is up, blocking the air from escaping through the nose

Nasal Sounds

• velum is lowered to allow the air to escape through both the nose and the mouth

Stops (Plosives)

• a complete closure either in the oral cavity or at the glottis and at various places of articulation

Fricatives

• continuant sounds where the airflow is so severely obstructed that it causes friction, but is not completely blocked

Affricates

• produced by a stop closure followed immediately by a gradual release of the closure that produces an effect characteristic of a fricative

Liquids

• some obstruction of the airstream in the mouth, but not enough to cause any real constriction or friction

  • the tongue touches the alveolar ridge while air escapes through the mouth along the lowered sides of the tongue

Glides

• little obstruction of the airstream, after articulating [j] or [w], the tongue glides quickly into place for pronouncing the next vowel, that is why they are called “glides”

Vowels

• produced with little restriction of the airflow from the lungs out through the mouth and/or the nose

  • the quality of a vowel depends on the shape of the vocal tract as the air passes through…

    • different parts of the tongue (not the tip) may be high or low in the mouth

    • the lips may be pursed or spread

    • the velum may be raised or lowered

Vowels are Classified Based on

• how high or low in the mouth the tongue is

• how forward or backward in the mouth the tongue is

• if the lips are rounded or spread

Tense Vowels

• produced with greater tension of the tongue muscles or greater vocal tract constriction

Dipthongs

• rapid transition from the [a] vowel in “father” followed rapidly by the [ɪ] in “fit” resulting in the dipthong [aɪ] in “bite” or “light”

Glides

• semivowels and semiconsonants

  • minimal airstream friction like vowels

  • never form the nucleus of a syllable like vowels, so this makes them like consonants

Suprasegmentals

prosodic features

• involve the rhythmic and intonational aspect of language

  • length, pitch, stretch

• suprasegmental do not involve the actual production of phonemes

• they are those features of speech that extend over more than 1 segment, like word stress, sentence stress or intonation

Length/Duration

• speech sounds may be identical in their place or manner features but differ in length/duration

• in some languages, when a speech sound is prolonged, it can make a difference in words or meaning

  • biru [biru] with a regular i means “building”

  • biiru [bi:ru] with a long i sound means “beer”

Pitch/Frequency (Hz)

• we control the level of pitch in speech by:

  • controlling the tension of the vocal folds

  • controlling the amount of air that passes through the glottis

    • tensed vocal folds and greater air pressure results in higher pitch on vowels — more vibration

    • less tense vocal folds and lower air pressure in lower pitch — less vibration

Elements of Pitch

• Tone

• Intonation

Tone

• variation in pitch at the word level

• some languages…

  • are non-tone languages

  • are tone languages

  • have rising and falling tones (e.g., Maderin)

  • have level tones: high, mid, low (e.g., Tsuut’ina or Sarcee)

Non-Tone Languages

• pronouncing [kæt] with different pitches does not result in a different meanning/word

Tone Languages

• differing pitches result in different meanings/words

  • e.g., In Nupe (a Nigerian language)

    • high pitch [ba] = to be sour

    • low pitch [ba] = to count

Level Tone Languages

• level tones that signal meaning differences are called register tones

• the lowering of the pitch is called downdrift

  • each high tone is always lower than the preceding high tone but higher than the low tone that immediately precedes it

Intonation

• variation of pitch that is not used to distinguish words, but sentences

  • pitch contour of an utterance may affect the meaning of the whole sentence

  • English and French are intonation languages

  • falling intonation at the end of an utterance is called a terminal (intonation) contour

  • rising or level intonation, called a non-terminal (intonation) contour, often signals incompleteness

Loudness

• volume or strength of a sound, or syllables/words are pronounced with less or extra effort

• syllables are articulated with different intensity

Research on Suprasegmentals

• they can have more influence on intelligibility and comprehensibility than phonemes (segmental)

• researched the influence of instructions of phonemes vs. suprasegmentals and found that suprasegmentals have greater influence on the raters when rating pronunciation than segmentals

Stress and Rhythm

• languages can generally be classified as stress-timed or syllable-timed

  • English, Russian, Arabic and Persian are stress-timed

    • syllables are stressed differently — unpredictable, random rhythm (duh Duh duh or DUHH Duh duh)

  • French, Spanish, and many Asian languages are syllable-timed

    • syllables receive equal stress — more unified rhythm which takes more time (Duh Duh Duh Duh Duh)