Chapter 2 Speech Sounds

2.1 Speech production and perception

Phonetics is the study of speech sounds. It includes three main areas:

1. Articulatory phonetics – the study of the production of speech sounds

2. Acoustic phonetics – the study of the physical properties of the sounds produced in speech

3. Auditory phonetics – the study of perception of speech sounds

Most phoneticians are interested in articulatory phonetics.

2.2 Speech organs

Speech organs are those parts of the human body involved in the production of speech. The speech organs can be considered as consisting of three parts: the initiator of the air stream, the producer of voice and the resonating cavities.

2.3 Segments, divergences, and phonetic transcription

2.3.1 Segments and divergences

As there are more sounds in English than its letters, each letter must represent more than one sound.

2.3.2 Phonetic transcription

International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA): the system of symbols for representing the pronunciation of words in any language according to the principles of the International Phonetic Association. The symbols consists of letters and diacritics. Some letters are taken from the Roman alphabet, some are special symbols.

2.4 Consonants

2.4.1 Consonants and vowels

A consonant is produced by constricting or obstructing the vocal tract at some places to divert, impede, or completely shut off the flow of air in the oral cavity.

A vowel is produced without obstruction so no turbulence or a total stopping of the air can be perceived.

2.4.2 Consonants

The categories of consonant are established on the basis of several factors. The most important of these factors are:

1. the actual relationship between the articulators and thus the way in which the air passes through certain parts of the vocal tract (manner of articulation);

2. where in the vocal tract there is approximation, narrowing, or the obstruction of the air (place of articulation).

2.4.3 Manners of articulation

1. Stop/plosive: A speech sound which is produced by stopping the air stream from the lungs and then suddenly releasing it. In English, [ ] are stops and [ ] are nasal stops.

2. Fricative: A speech sound which is produced by allowing the air stream from the lungs to escape with friction. This is caused by bringing the two articulators, e.g. the upper teeth and the lower lip, close together but not closes enough to stop the airstreams completely. In English, [ ] are fricatives.

3. (Median) approximant: An articulation in which one articulator is close to another, but without the vocal tract being narrowed to such an extent that a turbulent airstream is produced. In English this class of sounds includes [ ].

4. Lateral (approximant): A speech sound which is produced by partially blocking the airstream from the lungs, usually by the tongue, but letting it escape at one or both sides of the blockage. [ ] is the only lateral in English.

Other consonantal articulations include trill, tap or flap, and affricate.

2.4.4 Places of articulation

1. Bilabial: A speech sound which is made with the two lips.

2. Labiodental: A speech sound which is made with the lower lip and the upper front teeth.

3. Dental: A speech sound which is made by the tongue tip or blade and the upper front teeth.

4. Alveolar: A speech sound which is made with the tongue tip or blade and the alveolar ridge.

5. Postalveolar: A speech sound which is made with the tongue tip and the back of the alveolar ridge.

6. Retroflex: A speech sound which is made with the tongue tip or blade curled back so that the underside of the tongue tip or blade forms a stricture with the back of the alveolar ridge or the hard palate.

7. Palatal: A speech sound which is made with the front of the tongue and the hard palate.

8. Velar: A speech sound which is made with the back of the tongue and the soft palate.

9. Uvular: A speech sound which is made with the back of the tongue and the uvula, the short projection of the soft tissue and muscle at the posterior end of the velum.

10. Pharyngeal: A speech sound which is made with the root of the tongue and the walls of the pharynx.

11. Glottal: A speech sound which is made with the two pieces of vocal folds pushed towards each other.

2.4.5 The consonants of English

Received Pronunciation (RP): The type of British Standard English pronunciation which has been regarded as the prestige variety and which shows no regional variation. It has often been popularly referred to as “BBC English” or “Oxford English” because it is widely used in the private sector of the education system and spoken by most newsreaders of the BBC network.

A chart of English consonants

In many cases there are two sounds that share the same place and manner of articulation. These pairs of consonants are distinguished by voicing, the one appearing on the left is voiceless and the one on the right is voiced.

Therefore, the consonants of English can be described in the following way:

[p] voiceless bilabial stop

[b] voiced bilabial stop

[s] voiceless alveolar fricative

[z] voiced alveolar fricative

[m] bilabial nasal

[n] alveolar nasal

[l] alveolar lateral

[j] palatal approximant

[h] glottal fricative

[r] alveolar approximant

2.5 Vowels

2.5.1 The criteria of vowel description

1. The part of the tongue that is raised – front, center, or back.

2. The extent to which the tongue rises in the direction of the palate. Normally, three or four degrees are recognized: high, mid (often divided into mid-high and mid-low) and low.

3. The kind of opening made at the lips – various degrees of lip rounding or spreading.

4. The position of the soft palate – raised for oral vowels, and lowered for vowels which have been nasalized.

2.5.2 The theory of cardinal vowels

[Icywarmtea doesn’t quite understand this theory.]

Cardinal vowels are a set of vowel qualities arbitrarily defined, fixed and unchanging, intending to provide a frame of reference for the description of the actual vowels of existing languages.

By convention, the eight primary cardinal vowels are numbered from one to eight as follows: CV1[ ], CV2[ ], CV3[ ], CV4[ ], CV5[ ], CV6[ ], CV7[ ], CV8[ ].

A set of secondary cardinal vowels is obtained by reversing the lip-rounding for a give position: CV9 – CV16. [I am sorry I cannot type out many of these. If you want to know, you may consult the textbook p. 47. – icywarmtea]

2.5.3 Vowel glides

Pure (monophthong) vowels: vowels which are produced without any noticeable change in vowel quality.

Vowel glides: Vowels where there is an audible change of quality.

Diphthong: A vowel which is usually considered as one distinctive vowel of a particular language but really involves two vowels, with one vowel gliding to the other.

2.5.4 The vowels of RP

[ ] high front tense unrounded vowel

[ ] high back lax rounded vowel

[ ] central lax unrounded vowel

[ ] low back lax rounded vowel

2.6 Coarticulation and phonetic transcription

2.6.1 Coarticulation

Coarticulation: The simultaneous or overlapping articulation of two successive phonological units.

Anticipatory coarticulation: If the sound becomes more like the following sound, as in the case of lamp, it is known as anticipatory coarticulation.

Perseverative coarticulation: If the sound displays the influence of the preceding sound, as in the case of map, it is perseverative coarticulation.

Nasalization: Change or process by which vowels or consonants become nasal.

Diacritics: Any mark in writing additional to a letter or other basic elements.

2.6.2 Broad and narrow transcriptions

The use of a simple set of symbols in our transcription is called a broad transcription. The use of more specific symbols to show more phonetic detail is referred to as a narrow transcription. The former was meant to indicate only these sounds capable of distinguishing one word from another in a given language while the latter was meant to symbolize all the possible speech sounds, including even the minutest shades of pronunciation.

2.7 Phonological analysis

Phonetics is the study of speech sounds. It includes three main areas: articulatory phonetics, acoustic phonetics, and auditory phonetics. On the other hand, phonology studies the rules governing the structure, distribution, and sequencing of speech sounds and the shape of syllables. There is a fair degree of overlap in what concerns the two subjects, so sometimes it is hard to draw the boundary between them. Phonetics is the study of all possible speech sounds while phonology studies the way in which speakers of a language systematically use a selection of these sounds in order to express meaning. That is to say, phonology is concerned with the linguistic patterning of sounds in human languages, with its primary aim being to discover the principles that govern the way sounds are organized in languages, and to explain the variations that occur.

2.8 Phonemes and allophones

2.8.1 Minimal pairs

Minimal pairs are two words in a language which differ from each other by only one distinctive sound and which also differ in meaning. E.g. the English words tie and die are minimal pairs as they differ in meaning and in their initial phonemes /t/ and /d/. By identifying the minimal pairs of a language, a phonologist can find out which sound substitutions cause differences of meaning.

2.8.2 The phoneme theory

2.8.3 Allophones

A phoneme is the smallest linguistic unit of sound that can signal a difference in meaning. Any of the different forms of a phoneme is called its allophones. E.g. in English, when the phoneme / / occurs at the beginning of the word like peak / /, it is said with a little puff of air, it is aspirated. But when / / occurs in the word like speak / /, it is said without the puff of the air, it is unaspirated. Both the aspirated [ ] in peak and the unaspirated [ =] in speak have the same phonemic function, i.e. they are both heard and identified as / / and not as / /; they are both allophones of the phoneme / /.

2.9 Phonological processes

2.9.1 Assimilation

Assimilation: A process by which one sound takes on some or all the characteristics of a neighboring sound.

Regressive assimilation: If a following sound is influencing a preceding sound, we call it regressive assimilation.

Progressive assimilation: If a preceding sound is influencing a following sound, we call it progressive assimilation.

Devoicing: A process by which voiced sounds become voiceless. Devoicing of voiced consonants often occurs in English when they are at the end of a word.

2.9.2 Phonological processes and phonological rules

The changes in assimilation, nasalization, dentalization, and velarization are all phonological processes in which a target or affected segment undergoes a structural change in certain environments or contexts. In each process the change is conditioned or triggered by a following sound or, in the case of progressive assimilation, a preceding sound. Consequently, we can say that any phonological process must have three aspects to it: a set of sounds to undergo the process; a set of sounds produced by the process; a set of situations in which the process applies.

We can represent the process by mans of an arrow: voiced fricative → voiceless / __________ voiceless. This is a phonological rule. The slash (/) specifies the environment in which the change takes place. The bar (called the focus bar) indicates the position of the target segment. So the rule reads: a voiced fricative is transformed into the corresponding voiceless sound when it appears before a voiceless sound.

2.9.3 Rule ordering

[No much to say, so omitted – icywarmtea]

2.10 Distinctive features

Distinctive feature: A particular characteristic which distinguishes one distinctive sound unit of a language from another or one group of sounds from another group.

Binary feature: A property of a phoneme or a word which can be used to describe the phoneme or word. A binary feature is either present or absent. Binary features are also used to describe the semantic properties of words.

2.11 Syllables

Suprasegmental features: Suprasegmental features are those aspects of speech that involve more than single sound segments. The principal suprasegmental features are syllables, stress, tone, and intonation.

Syllable: A unit in speech which is often longer than one sound and smaller than a whole word.

Open syllable: A syllable which ends in a vowel.

Closed syllable: A syllable which ends in a consonant.

Maximal onset principle: The principle which states that when there is a choice as to where to place a consonant, it is put into the onset rather than the coda. E.g. The correct syllabification of the word country should be / /. It shouldn’t be / / or / / according to this principle.

2.12 Stress

Stress refers to the degree of force used in producing a syllable. In transcription, a raised vertical line [ ] is used just before the syllable it relates to.