PHONOLOGY 2

Chapter 1:

1.1: Phonetics, phonology and the speech mechanism.

Phonetics: “about the physical nature of human speech sounds, irrespective of which language is being spoken” —> it deals with the anatomy and physiology of speech and studies the whole mechanisms involves in the production and reception of speech. Actual realisation of the sounds. Divided into 3:

• Articulatory phonetics: linked to the speaker, studies the way in which is speech is produced.
• Acoustic phonetics: what happens between the speaker and the hearer, investigates the physical properties of speech sounds as waves which are transmitted from a speaker.
• Auditory phonetics: related to the hearer, deals with the way in which speech is perceived and processed by the brain of the hearer.

Phonology: “is the study of the way native speakers organise and store the knowledge of the sounds of their own language that enables them to use it appropriately on all occasions” —> concerned with the linguistic system of a language — patterns of sounds that occur in a particular language and the way in which each sound represents differences of meaning in a language. More abstract side.

These communication processes represent the speech mechanism which consists of 3 main stages:

• Production: of speech sounds which are articulated in the vocal apparatus of the speaker.
• Transmission: of the acoustic signal through the air.
• Reception: of speech sounds by the listener.

These are controlled by the brain, where the speech mechanism originates. —> gives order to the organs of speech to produce the sound. Speech production depends on 3 main systems:

• Respiratory — respiration
• Phonatory — phonation
• Articulatory — articulation
• 4th (Ladefoged) oro-nasal, which depends on the status of the velum.

The organs involved, work as follows:

• Respiration: airflow (created by difference in air pressure) is needed to generate sounds. This may be:

  • Egressive: air flows out of the vocal tract.
  • Ingressive: air flows into the vocal tract.

Speech is almost exclusively egressive, exceptions are when sobbing or being out of breath.

• Phonation: the effect that the different positions of the vocal cords have on speech, is produced by the larynx (casing made of cartilage and muscle around the windpipe (trachea) which contains the vocal cords (vocal folds)). The larynx is made out of 3 main parts:

  • Thyroid cartilage: (Adam’s apple or Eve’s wedding ring) —> thicker protrusion in men.
  • Arytenoid cartilage: control the movement of the vocal cords.
  • Vocal folds:

The cords can assume the following 6 positions:

*   Closed glottis: vocal cords are shut tight together and completely obstruct the airflow —> glottal stop represented by the sign ?. 
*   Open glottis/voiceless: vocal cords wide apart and the air flows freely through the glottis producing voiceless sounds /s/
*   Vibrating/voiced: vocal cords are held loosely together but do not stop airflow completely, producing voiced sounds /z/
*   Whisper: vocal cords are brought together but do not vibrate.
*   Murmur/breathy voice: vocal cords are kept apart, but closer together that for the voicelessness —> vibration caused is different from voicing.
*   Creak/creaky voice: sounds like a succession of glottal stops during which the Arytenoids are pressed while the front portions of the vocal folds vibrate —> creak combined with voice —> smokers or people who suffer from a cold.

• Articulation: the organs of speech which constitute the Articulatory system also constitute the vocal tract (linguistic term for organs located after the larynx) — made up of the following 3 parts:

  • Pharyngeal cavity: space above the larynx — the pharynx is its main organ and can be modified causing change in the quality of the sounds produced by contraction the muscles around it and by moving the tongue backward.
  • Nasal cavity: space inside the nose. Air can pass through when the velum is open.
  • Oral cavity: tongue (tip, blade, front, back, root), the upper and lower lips, the roof of the mouth (alveolar ridge, palate and velum), and the jaw.

These can be grouped as follows according to their specialization and role:

• Lungs, bronchial tubes, muscles of the ribs, parts of the wind pipe (chest) constitute the respiratory system and are responsible for respiration.
• Larynx (throat) constitutes the phonatory system and is responsible for phonation.
• Nose, lips, teeth, roof of the mouth, jaw, uvola (head) constitute the Articulatory system and are responsible for the articulation of the sounds.

The tongue: is usually divided up to 5 parts (tip, blade, front, back, root) —> these in combination with other areas of the oral cavity, they create different sounds.

Upper and lower lips: are elastic and can assume different positions:

• Neutral (relaxed position)
• Rounded (/u/)
• Spread / unrounded (/i/)

Root of the mouth: alveolar ridge (behind the front teeth), hard palate, soft palate, velum and uvula (hangs at the back)

1.2: The International Phonetic Association and the International Phonetic Alphabet

Since it was published (remember also JIPA) it has always been subject to critical review and changes.

IPA has always been the most widely used system for transcribing the sound of a language. The idea behind is that each distinguishable sound present in a language in given its own symbol, even though some phonemes may consist of two characters, the symbol still represents one sound only.

• Phonetic transcription or narrow transcription: takes into account and represents as many phonetic details as possible, it describes sounds on the basis of their Articulatory/Auditory identity and encloses symbols in brackets ().
• Phonemic transcription or broad transcription: gives as few details as possible and encloses symbols in // — it describes only sounds which have a linguistic function.

IPA is effective when describing and/or learning a new language and Wells (1982) has distinguished in varieties:

• Phonetic realisation: the pronunciation of a sound which may, or may not, appear in the same lexical set in different varieties. Ex: fish, hit, kiss. (New Zealand vs Australia)
• Lexical distribution: the same individual words belong to different lexical sets in different varieties. TOMATO.
• Phonotactic distribution: phonemes can co-occur in words. Example: Rothic or non-rothic (br vs AmE) or Mary, merry, marry.
• Phonemic systems: the minimum number of symbols needed to transcribe that variety.

"the rather obvious-seeming fact that the number of phonemic symbols must be exactly the same as the number of phonemes we decide exist in the language. It is rather like writing with a typewriter - there is a fixed number of keys that you can press"

Chapter 2: The development of American English

2.1: The roots and spread of American English

AmE is a Germanic language which belongs to the Indo-European language family, is a West Germanic language Which derives from the Germanic dialects brought to Britain by:

• the Jutes (Jutland, Denmark)
• the Angles (Denmark / Germany)
• The Frisians (Netherlands / Germany)
• During the 5th and 6th century.

It is only by the opening of the 19th century that the number of native speakers of English increases exponentially to 350 million.

Waves to America:

• They reached Jamestown in 1607 establishing the fist successful English colony near Chesapeake Bay (Virginia). | before there was another expedition in 1584 but they soon disappeared.| They spoke varieties which were very close to the emerging London standard. For example, the loss of the , which was typical of Southeastern England during this period.
• They came from East Anglia, characterised by a non-rhotic accent in the east of England and reached Massachusetts bay in 1620.
• Characterised by the most important settlers arrived in Delaware, Philadelphia, New York and New England from Ulster in 1724: the Scots-irish who spoke a rather archaic from of Scots English, was a rhotic variety and it had an important impact on the development of AmE since they spread throughout the country — where r pronouncing is still present.

AmE was deeply influenced by these varieties. The current situation still reflects some of the boundaries and the dialects spoken by the original settlers, in particular “in some ways the major dialects of the US are actually becoming more different from one another rather than more alike.”

Four main dialects of AmE are identified:

• Southern

• Northern

• Midland

  • Influenced by speakers from Southeastern England and East Anglia in the 17th century

• Western

  • Created by the merging of the other 3 as America expanded, especially toward the Pacific Coast.

Clear cut boundaries do not exist in reality, for example, many people from the Midland and northern areas migrated to the south, influencing the languages spoken there so is difficult to find “genuine Southern accents” in these places.

However, the border separating the (map 12) North from the North Midland is also the southern boundary of other phonological features. North/North Midland is stilll one of the most profound divisions in American phonology as it was in the past.

2.2 American English today:

• 1/3 of the world populations speaks English.
• It is the first language of many countries: New Zealand, Australia, UK, Ireland, South Africa.
• It is used as an official language and, thus, as the primary medium communication in domains such as government, law court, broadcasting, the press and the educational system in over seventy countries. (Ghana, Nigeria, India, Singapore).
• It has achieved a special role in teaching, in over 100 countries.

No language before had become this “global” and this can be attributed to two main driving forces:

• Thanks to Britain sending explorers to seek new trade than English spread
• USA’s industrial, economic and military power that this spreading still continues.

Thanks to the power of people who speak it, power intended in many ways: political, military, technological, economic and cultural contexts.

BrE has historically had more prestige than AmE and this is due to 2 factors:

• Imperialism of UK
• The long publishing tradition that the country has always had of producing textbooks and dictionaries and of marketing them all over the world.

This has now changed as the majority of the world’s speakers have an American pronunciation, vocabulary and grammar. (400 million against 57 million)

Received pronunciation (RP) is indeed rather restrictive, being used only by 3-5 per cent of the population of England.

Although SE [Standard English, i.e. RP| is widely understood, it is not widely produced. Only a minority of people within a country (e.g. radio newscasters) actually use it when they talk.

Most people speak a variety of regional English, or an admixture of standard and regional Englishes, and reserve such labels as 'BBC English' or 'the Queen's English' for what they perceive to be a pure' SE. Similarly, when they write - itself a minority activity - the consistent use of SE, is required only in certain tasks (such as a letter to a newspaper, but not necessarily to a close friend). More than anywhere else, SE is to be found in print. On this basis, we may define the Standard English of an English-speaking country as a minority variety (identified chiefly by its vocabulary, grammar, and orthography) which carries most prestige and is most widely understood.

Furthermore, American influence is manifested "in virtually every walk of life". Crystal 2 identifies a number of domains, listed below, within which English has become a leading language. From the list it can be seen that Great Britain and the United States of America have been, and still are, key factors in determining the globalization of English:

• Politics: thanks to the legacy of the British Empire and the League of Nations which gave a special role to English, English still plays an official role in the proceedings of most major international political gatherings;
• Economics: by the beginning of the nineteenth century, Britain had become the world's leading industrial and trading nation; during the Industril Revolution, English was the language of the majority of leading scientis and technologists; London and New York became the investment capitals of the world with the growth of the international banking system;
• The press: thanks to the introduction of new printing technology and new methods of mass production and transportation during the nineteenth century (e.g, with the emergence in 1856 of the New York Associated Press, the majority of the information transmitted along the telegraph wires of the wotld was in English) and the development of the independent press in the USA. Today, about a third of the world's newspapers are published in countries where English has special status;
• Advertising: thanks to the dramatic increase in the use of advertisements in publications, especially in the more industrialized countries towards the end of the nineteenth century; nowadays posters, billboards, electric displays, shop signs in English have become part of the everyday scene;
• Broadcasting: English was the first language to be transmitted by radio in 1920 when the first commercial radio station was broadcast in Pittsburgh (Pennsylvania): two years later, there were over 500 broadcasting stations licensed in the USA and a similarly dramatic expansion affected public television twenty years later. Many other countries such as the Soviet Union, Italy, Japan, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Sweden and Germany launched English-language radio programs;
• Motion pictures: although the technology of this industry started in Europe (especially in England and France from 1895 on), from 1915) the USA, particularly Hollywood, began to dominate the scene. As a natural consequence, when sound was added to the motion picture in the late 1920s, it was English which suddenly came to dominate the movie world; Popular music the second new entertainment technology which emerged at-recording industry. Starting with the firm Columbia in 1898, radios started to spread worldwide and American and British singers and bands, such as Elvis Presley in the USA, the Beatles and the Rolling Stones in the UK, soon dominated the recording world;
• International travel and safety: business meetings, academic conferences, international conventions, sports events, military occupations, the domains of transportation and accommodation, safety instructions on international flights and sailings, etc. are increasingly in English. Furthermore, English has become the international language of the sea (more specifically, Seaspeak, and of aviation (Airspeak) when pilots and air traffic controllers speak different languages;
• Education: English has become the normal medium of instruction in higher education for many countries since the 1960s;
• Communications: the first language which appeared on the web was English, both when it started as ARPANET (the Advanced Research Projects Agency network) in the USA in the late 1960s and when the service was opened up to private and commercial organizations in the 1980s. Even though the dominance of English has been significantly reduced as the world wide web has expanded, there appears to be more high-quality content on the web in English than in other languages; furthermore, three-quarters of the world's mail is in English.

Chapter 3: American English and British English

3.1 – Vowel sounds:

When a vowel sound is produced, the airstream escapes from the mouth in an unobstructed manner (= the tongue does not touch any part of the mouth when these sounds are made) — they are always voiced (=continuous vibration of the vocal folds). Categorised in 4 criteria:

• TONGUE HEIGHT: refers to how high or low the tongue is /i:/; as in beat, is high, /e/, as in bet, is intermediate; /ae/, as in bat is low.
• TONGUE POSITION: refers to the part of the tongue which is raised when pronouncing vowel sounds. /i:/ front part, /u:/ as in moon, back of the tongue. Front vowel vs low vowel.
• LIP ROUNDING: refers to the shape that our lips assume when pronouncing vowel sounds. /i:/ spread or unrounded; /u:/ rounded.
• LENGHT: refers to how long a sound is when pronounced. Fill vs Feel = /i:/ vs (I).
  *When symbols appear inside square, they are unrounded vowels, when they appear inside circles, they are rounded.

AmE vs BrE:

These vowels may be pronounced in various vases in different countries.

Those in row 6 and 7 differ among American speakers.

Vowel in row 8 is usually not pronounced among AmE speakers when in between and .

3.2 — Consonant sounds:

Categories:

• Voicing: the vibration, or lack of it, of the vocal folds.
• Place of articulation: the point at which the air stream is most obstructed (horizontal axis).
• Manner of articulation: how the articulators modulate the airflow.

24 consonant sounds Highlighted.

Plosives: when the glottal stop occurs because during their production, the airflow from the lungs is completely blocked at some points by specific organs.

• Bilabial: obstructed by the two lips.
• Alveolar: obstructed by the tongue touching the al alveolar ridge.
• Velar: obstructed by the lowering of the soft palate of velum.
• Glottal: obstructed by a quick closure of the glottis.
• Postalveolar: obstructed by the tongue touching the place just after the alveolar ridge.
• Nasal: because the flow of air does not pass through the mouth, and is directed through the nasal passage.
• Fricatives: there is not a total obstruction of the air flow, but rather there is an audible friction of the breath through a narrow opening between the organs of speech involved.
• Labiodental: friction is caused by the closure of the lip touching the upper teeth.
• Dental: friction is caused by the closure of the tongue touching the upper teeth.
• Approximants: are created with little obstruction of air in that the tongue is positioned centrally in the vocal tract, but lets the air flow pass around it.
• Affricates: are a combination of a plosive and a fricative —> they begin like plosives, with a complete obstruction of the air flow and end with a restricted flow of air like fricatives.

/w/ and /j/ are peculiar sounds in that they behave both like a vowel and like a consonant. The air Flow is never obstructed, but the aperture through which it passes is smaller than the aperture of any vowel. They are often called semi-consonants or semi-vowels.

3.3 — Stress and Intonation:

When pronounced in isolation, all monosyllabic word are stressed, where’s polysyllabic words, in any context, always have one syllable which is more prominent than others. When producing a stressed syllable, the 4 phonetic variables of intensity, vowel duration, pitch and vowel quality can be observed. Indeed, a prominent syllable can be produced:

• By speaking it more loudly (intensity)
• By lengthening its vowel (vowel duration)
• By marking its pitch (pitch) —<refers to the highness or lowness
• By contrasting it to another one where the vowel has been reduced, for example, to a schwa (vowel quality)

Stress is an extremely important suprasegmental feature, partly because the meaning of words may change if the stress is changed (desert - dessert).

In his pioneering work, Jones (1918/1969:361) points out three significant differences between the two varieties:

• in rising intonation - the voice in AmE "appears to start as a rule at a mid or rather low pitch and to remain fairly even until the final rise" (Jones 1918/1969:361);
• in fall-rise intonation - the fall in AmE is "much less in extent" and "the entire fall-rise is at a higher pitch-level than that of the preceding syllable" Jones 1918/1969:363);
• in fall-rise intonation - AmE has "a rise in the course of the syllable preceding the fall-rise" (Jones 1918/1969:364).

In a more recent study, Ladefoged (2005:14-15) highlights three normal (unemphatic) intonations 32 of AmE:

1. one used in unmarked (ie. normal unemphatic) statements, as the one in the I'm going away utterance in Figure 29, ending in a falling tune after a rise on the word going;
2. one used in unmarked (i.e. normal unemphatic) wh-questions, such as the one in the Where are you going? utterance in Figure 30, which starts with a lower pitch at the beginning of the sentence and has a greater rise on the first syllable of going, so that the whole pattern of the tune sounds like a rise-fall on the last word and not just as a fall, as happens in BrE.
3. one used in unmarked (i.e. normal unemphatic) yes-no questions, like the one in the Are you going home utterance in Figure 31, which has a rise at the end after a fall.

Chapter 4: American English Dialects

4.1 — Southern American English:

The vowels in words like caught and cat, for example, like all tense/lax vowel pairs" before <, are becoming merged. caught and cot both sound like cot, pool and pull are now homophones or near homophones, and pairs like feel and fill and sale and sell are also increasingly becoming homophones (Bailey and Tiller 2006:40). The caught/ cot merger is particularly interesting for it signals that the Texan phonological system is moving away from the "Southern Shift"

4.3 — Northern American English:

Syracuse, Rochester, Buffalo, Cleveland, Toledo, Detroit, Flint, Gary, Chicago, Rockford. Characterised by:

• The Northern Cities shift helps
• The non-merging of words as cot/caught
• Pronunciation of vowels in words such as can’t
• The dropping of postvocalic /r/

The northern cities shift helps to define the boundary between northern and midland AmE. —There are many varieties in this dialect, consequently, the features which usually characterise it do not always occur.

3.3–Midwestern American English:

Is usually considered the home of General American but this is a misconception as migration caused a large extent of variation in terms of the English variety spoken there. Anyway, is characterised by:

• A very strong postvocalic and , which are more velarised and sometimes with the tongue tip raised.
• An intrusive /r/ in words such as wash —> warsh.
• The fish/feesh merger.
• The cot/caught (or low back vowel) merger (fairly recent development).
• R and D in New York are pronounced with the tongue touching the teeth.

3.4–Western American English:

The real Professor(s) Higgins:

Section 1–a professor of Phonetics:

Henry Sweet, phonetician: The whole point of his “Current shorthand” is that it can express every sound in the language perfectly, vowels as consonants, and that your hand has to make no stroke except for the easy and current ones with which you write m, n, l, p and q, scribbling them at whatever angle comes easiest to you, his unfortunate determination to make this remarkable and quite legible script serve also as a Shorthand reduced it in his own practice to the most inscrutable of cryptograms.

HIS TRUE OBJECTIVE WAS the provision of a full, accurate. Legible script for ur noble but ill-dressed language; but he was led past by his contempt for the popular Pitman system of Shorthand, which he called the Pytfall system. —> the triumph of Pitman was because of business organisation: cheap textbooks and exercise books were available in this and school where experienced teachers coached you up to the necessary sufficient. Sweet couldn’t organise his market in that fashion—> he was angry at Oxford for the failure of it to do justice to his eminence. Such people as phoneticians are among the most important people in England right now.

Pygmalion (1938-12) shows the figure of a Phoenician, a linguist who studies languages scientifically and whose existence is usually confined to the knowledge of very few people belonging to the field, emerged publicly for the first time.

Section 2.2– The Philological Society

Established in 1830 it is the oldest learned society in Great Britain devoted to the scholarly study of language and languages. It had a particular interest in historical comparative linguistics and maintains its traditional interest in the structure, development and varieties of Modern English.

The society experiences a period of heightened success in the 1860’s-70s with phoneticians suc as Alexander John Ellis and Henry Sweet — through the years it continued to attract known scholars like Bopp and Grimm.

The greatest achievement to date is what has since remained the foremost authoritative dictionary of the English language: Oxford English Dictionary, whose first official dictionary was Augustus Henry Murray.

Daniel Jones: played a key role in the development and Institutionalisation of the study of phonetic in England. In 1907 he secured a part-time lectureship in phonetics at University College in London —> his reputation soon expanded and in 1911 he was named Britain’s first Professor of Phonetics. He produced an extremely large number of publications and transcripts which offered meticulous descriptions of English phonetics ì, especially directed at second language learners, and explanations of other languages such as Cornish, Sindhi and Ga. Besides, he published analyses of French, Spanish, Italian, Russian and Cantonese.

He identified and systemised the eight Cardinal vowels. He was also interested in the improvement of orthography. He was more concerned about practical matters, he developed a new concept of phoneme, considering phonemes as families of sounds, each appropriate to a specific phonetic context.

He also distinguished prosodic features from phonemes and coined the terms chroneme and toneme to denote differences in length and pitch. he invested time in scientific descriptions of his analyses by means of photos of his own lip movements, X-rays of his tongue positions, oscillograms. He recorded his voice, and in 1956 he recorded his pronunciation of the Cardinal Vowels on gramophone records (Thomas 2011). The next paragraphs will illustrate some of these descriptions concerning Cardinal Vowels in detail, and one of Daniel Jones's major works, the English Pronouncing Dictionary (1917), which both students and teachers, native and non-native speakers of English, still use nowadays (almost 100 years later!) as a major reference for the pronunciation of the English language.

One of the main aims characterizing his works was to provide the learner with a scientific study of the English speech sounds and their distribution in connected speech. It is, indeed, with this idea in mind that he identified and systematized the eight Cardinal Vowels as a technique for characterizing the vowel inventories of language (i.e. of all languages), and illustrated the speech sounds of English to give foreigners the scientific information needed in order to learn educated Southern English, in an appreciably lighter fashion ones 1922: Il. The general idea behind the concept of Cardinal Vowels is that they demarcate the articulatory vowel space that speakers have at their disposal; consequently, such vowels can be regarded as reference points for the phonetic description and transcription of any language. For this purpose, and with the firm conviction that these vowel sounds can only be learnt from a teacher who knows how to make them or from a gramophone record or tape record, Daniel Jones recorded his pronunciation of the Cardinal Vowels on gramophone records". The following extract describes their use as presented by Daniels Jones himself in the booklet which accompanied his two-record set in 1956:

Section 4–playing Mr. Higgins:

Praat (Dutch for talk) is a freeware program for the analysis and reconstruction of acoustic speech signals.

Student could use it for:

• Recording themselves in order to compare their English to other’s
• Explore varieties of English
• Become more familiar with the language features studied theoretically during linguistic courses.

4.1.1–The Praat windows:

A variety of windows will open, it is better to explore the main windows before starting to use the actual Spectrogram.

• Praat objects windows: is used to open, create and save files, as well as, to open the various editors and queries which will be needed to work with sound files.
• Praat picture windows: used to create and display publication-quality images.
• Praat editor windows: mostly used when examining a sound file, the spectrogram on the bottom, and selections and measurements can be taken by using the cursor.
• Praat info windows: will pop up with the specific result when a query is made either in the editor window or the objects window.

TO KNOW:

• Pitch: quality of a sound governed by the rate of vibrations producing it; the degree or highness or lowness of a tone.
• The intensity of a sound wave: is measured in decibels and represents the power and loudness of the wave.

A dormant (called f1, f2, f3, f4 —> voice) is a concentration of acoustic energy around a particular frequency in the speech wave, it emphasises the harmonic, with higher amplitudes of a speech sound. —> f0 is the lowest frequency of a complex sound and is equal to the Pitch of one’s voice. F1 and F2 are important for vowels, while using dormant patterns, acoustic phonetics makes it possible to define specific vowels and differentiate them from one another. F1 describes the height of the tongue when the vowel is being produced, whereas f2 reflects the place of the tongue and the rounding of the lips —> will be further apart for front vowels and closer together for back vowels.

Pulses: are single vibrations or short bursts of sound which produce variations in air pressure —> occur in pulse-like manner, pushing the air out of the mouth or nose and displacing air with pulse. —> can be represented as a waveform.

4.1.2—Recording, opening, and saving sounds:

To record sounds using Praat, a microphone, sound card, or external ADC (Analog-Digital Conversion) box will have to be plugged in to a computer before starting Praat, and then:

Objects → New → Record Mono (at this stage the Sound recorder window will pop up, see Figure 32).

The Sound recorder window

Through the Sound recorder window it will be possible to choose the sampling frequency (the default, 44100 Hz, is fine for most purposes), the microphone or other sound source, and whether to record a mono or stereo sound. In order to record and then to stop the recording, Record and Stop will have to be pressed respectively, being careful that the sound level ar stays within the green range to avoid clipping"?. Once a recordinglas been made, it will have to be named and saved, It will then show up in the Praat objects window where it's ready for editing. Praat can only record one minute long chunks, to record longer sounds, the buffer size in Praat → Preferences → Sound Recording Preferences will have to be changed, otherwise another software program to record the session can be used and then the sounds can be imported into Praat for analysis and manipulation.

If there is no need to record a sound because one has already been recorded lin aif, wav or flac format®, there are two ways to open it in Praat: on Mac OS X, the supported files can be dragged onto the Praat icon in the dock, otherwise: Objects → Open → Read trom File… as it works for other operating systems. Once the files have been uploaded, they will appear in the Objects window for further use. To save a file, given that files are never saved by default by Praat, the file in the Objects window will have to be selected, then:

Objects → Save → Save as file.

4.1.3–Measuring waveforms and spectrograms:

Once a sound has been recorded and/or opened in Editor window via Objects → View & Edit, the Waveform of the sound will be represented as in Figure 25 above and, if the sound is sufficiently short, a broadband Spectrogram showing the spectral energy of the sound over time, will be displayed. In addition, a series of red dots (representing the Formants), blue lines (representing the speaker's Pitch), and a yellow line (representing the Intensity) might also be present. These can be enabled and disabled in the Editor → View → Show Analyses menu. The cursor will spawn two dotted lines by clicking within the Editor window.

A vertical bar will show the time within the sound where it has been clicked (labeled at the top in seconds) and, by clicking within the Spectrogram, a horizontal bar will show the frequency at the cursor (labeled on the left in red). If the Pitch or Intensity tracks are displayed where the cursor is placed, values at the time the cursor represent will be given on the left side of the editor window. In addition, portions of the sound can be selected by clicking and dragging them (or by using the Select menu). The time of the start and finish of the selection will be displayed in red, and the duration of the selection (in seconds) will be displayed in the top of the bar. The three gray bars at the bottom of the editor window can be used to play a sound in the editor window. The bottom-most bai (Total Duration) will play the entire sound. The middle bar (Visible Part) will play only the visible portion of the sound.

The different sections of the top bar (split by the cursor or selection), when clicked, will play the corresponding pieces of the visible portions of the sound file. Hitting < tab> also plays the visible portion of the file. To view some analyses and to get a closer look at the data, the five buttons in the bottom left corner of the window will have to be selected: all shows the entire file, in and out zoom in and out, sel zooms to make the current selection fill the window, and bak zooms back to the previous zoom level. When dealing with long sound files, in order to view analyses like the spectrogram and formants, zooming in will have to be selected to show only a pre-defined amount of time. The Group setting in the bottom right corner of the window will ensure that if two sounds are open in Editor windows at once, they will share the same zoom characteristics. This is best used to compare two versions of the same file, say, an original versus one with an acoustic modification made.

4.1.4– Viewing Pitch via a Narrowband Spectrogram:

The most reliable way of getting a sense of the Pitch through the course of the word in Praat is by examining a narrowband Spectrogram 2 with a reduced visible range 0