MAE Consonant Allophones

Suprasegmental Features:

Refer to aspects of speech that extend beyond or “above” the segment level. (Syllables, stress, tone, intonation, rhythm)

Sonority

A phonological feature related to acoustic energy.

Phonemes that are more sonorous typically…

Are louder, have more airflow and have more vocal fold vibration.

Sonority Sequencing Principle (SSP)

Onsets must rise in sonority to the nucleus and codas must fall or remain level in sonority.

Stress

Is a lexical characteristic that occurs at three levels:

1. Primary: most prominent stress in a word.

2. Secondary: less prominent but noticeable.

3. Unstressed

Tone

Not a contrastive feature in English.

Intonation

A feature at the phrase or sentence level.

Falling: statements, commands

Rising: yes/no questions

Mixed: lists, choice questions

Contrastive

Rhythm

The timing of speech. Is highly variable. English is often desceribed as “stress-Timed”

Acoustic Correlates of Stress:

Intensity (loudness)

Duration (length)

Frequency (pitch)

Minimal Pair

Two separate/distinct words that differ by only one phoneme.

Allophones

Levels of representation for phoneme categories.

Dialects of a language have unique…

Characteristics spanning all domains (phonetics, phonology, morphosyntax, vocabulary and pragmatics)

Dialect features can be:

Phonological, morphosyntactic or lexical

Accent

The phonetics and phonology of a dialect.

Idiolect

Personal dialect of an individual speaker. Vocal tract and laryngeal physiology result in unique aspects of voice quality, resonance and pitch.

A phoneme is really just…

A family or category of sounds. Broad transcription identifies the phoneme “categories”. Narrow transcription differentiates between examples of the category.

One (1) way that variations can be address is when the original phoneme is…

Replaced with a different phoneme.

Ex. Add voicing to /s/ = [z]

The second (2) way that variations can be addressed is when the original phoneme can be modified with…

A diacritic symbol

Ex. Add voicing to /s/ = [s̬]

Some variations can only be expressed with diacritics such as

Nasalization of a vowel

Ex. [i] = [ĩ]

Transcription Practice: “spooky”

Broad: /ˈspu.ki/

Narrow: [ˈspuː.kʰiː]

Nasals are:

Consonants that have the velopharyngeal port open and the oral cavity occluded. Airflow is blocked out of the oral cavity and flows freely through and out of the nasal cavity.

/m/ → Bilabial Nazalisation

• occlusion at the lips

• Tongue neutral

• Ex: mood, dime

/n/ - alveolar nazalisation

• occlusion is at alveolar ridge (tongue blade)

• Sides of the tongue are against upper teeth

• Ex: nook, fine, knot

/ŋ/ - Velar Nasalization

• Occlusion is at the soft palate (velum)

• “Ng” sound

• Cannot occur in onset (phonotactic constraint)

• Ex: sing, angle