Lecture 6: Phonetics, Part 2

Greek and Latin

  • Greek used have p aspirated and a p regular until p aspirated shifted to f

    • Misspellings reveal pronunciations and changes in them

Classification of Vowels

  • Helps us to develop theories on vowel spaces and natural sound changes

  • Vowel harmony: (front-back harmony) sometimes an affix will be determined based on the characteristics of the preceding noun or morpheme (front or back) and will be the opposite

    • Rounding harmony as well

Constanants

  • Other sounds: ejectives, clicks, implosives, trills

  • Ejectives: Like a t sound while holding your breath or another constanant

  • Clicks: Velar stop then sharply draw air into mouth with tongue

    • Dental click (tsk tsk)

    • Lateral click (Encourage a horse??? or sucking the sides of your tongue from the sides of your mouth)

    • Palatal click (clock ticking noise)

  • Implosives: Bilabial closure while trying to inhale

  • Trills: Some part of vocal tract flutters

    • Alveolar trill = rolling r close to alveolar ridge

    • Uvular trill = French/German r

    • Bilabial trill = buzzing

Spectrograms

  • Way to study speech sounds

  • Catches air vibrate which bounces off parts of vocal tract creating a waveform

  • Marks frequencies that make the greatest contributions

McGurk Effect

  • Guy repeats syllable and some people hear different syllables

    • Seeing is a big part of hearing

Pi

  • Voice Onset Time: vocal cords start vibrating some time after the stop closure is released

  • VOT 0-25 ms → voiced

  • VOT 25ms +→ voiceless

  • Categorical Perception: We have an arbitrary dividing line in the continuum of VOT

    • categorical perception detected in 1 month olds

  • Fricative look like bursts of light in spectrograms