Introduction to Phonetics, L306
R. Port, April 28, 2006
Our Final Exam is
Wednesday, May 3, 1pm in BH 105
Performance Skills :
be able to produce and identify a range of vowel qualities, rounded and
unrounded. Also produce voiced, unaspirated and aspirated version at
stop place of articulation. Do ejective stops and fricatives, implosive
stops, prenasalized stops. Do fricatives at any named place of
Also labial, dental and lateral clicks in unaspirated, aspirated and
forms. Do an apical trill.
- Ladefoged 5th Edition, Chapts 1-11 (and
- American English allophones webpage
- Port's continuous phonetics handouts
- ToBi materials
- Web materials on acoustics
- Spectrogram reading materials
- Port's paper ``Graphical basis of phones and phonemes''
Transcription: Be able to
transcribe dialects of English using the
basic IPA alphabet.
Speech anatomy: lips, tongue
tip (apex), tongue
blade, tongue dorsum, tongue root. Mouth, nasal cavity, pharynx
and oral),soft palate (velum), hard palate, alveolar ridge.
vocal folds, false vocal folds, trachea, epiglottis.
Basic symbol set of the IPA (International
Places of Articulation - at two
`levels of detail':
Labial, Apical, Palatal, Velar, Glottal, OR bilabial,
dental, alveolar, retroflex, palato-alveolar, palatal, velar, uvular,
labiovelar, glottal (Ladef, Table 7.3, p. 147)
Manners of Articulation
(Chapters 3, 7) : stop, nasal, approximant, fricative, trill, tap,
vs. central. What argument could you raise to claim that click is
a Manner of Artic? What argument could you raise to claim that a
click is a Place of Artic?
dimensions: tongue height, tongue backness, lip
rounding. For English, how many V dimensions? Only 2? Or 3?
Monophthongs vs diphthongs. Which
Vs in English
are ambiguous on this property?
Secondary vowel articulations:
Stressed, unstressed; reduced vowels,
full vowel; pitch
Tense Vs, lax Vs; closed vs. open
syllables (Which Eng
Vs only occur in closed syllables? or before /r/ or /l/?)
fricatives (obstruents); Essential gestures: oral
closure + nasal closure OR glottal closure
`Continuous-Time English Speech Production Model'
Stop variants: lateral release, glottal stop,
Homorganic relationships, voicing pairs. What is
Air stream mechanisms: (pulmonic, glottalic,
X (ingressive, egressive); Plosive, Ejective, Implosive, Click.
Voice-onset time: Continous, in fact, but
languages has 3 modes: prevoiced, short-lag (unaspirated), long-lag
Eng vs. French VOT patterns.
Other `voicing' cues for English: vowel
and obstruent duration for postvocalic obstruents.
Affricates vs. fricatives (note spelling!)
Breathy-voiced stops (voiced aspirates) (eg, in
Glottal articulations: [h] vs. voiceless
(laryngealized voice, glottal fry, breathy voice, etc)
This primitive theory of
phonetics (or phonology) is based on a set of `independent
tongue tip, tongue body, velum, vocal folds. Each of these
(or motor-control systems) is largely independent of the others, and
has a small set
of mutually exclusive values. Eg, the lips can be open, rounded
closed, but can never be in two states at once. Each system changes
in continuous time in one or two dimensions. Plots of each articulatory
system (reducing each to a single dimension) can be plotted against
(rather like a musical score). Be able to draw such plots for single
showing coarticulation, assimilation and certain timing details (eg,
VOT, coordination of velum with other oral articulators, etc).
Properties of the IPA phonetic
Phonology: the use of segmental phonetic
sounds for spelling
morphemes in languages.
(But segments leave out much important information)
- IPA attempts to be universal, but is
really inspired by orthographic alphabet (conventional spelling)
but is more
consistent for scientific purposes.
- Good for writing down approximate
but not exact ones.
- It is a better model for cognitive
form of words
than orthography, but is not necessarily a good model
- Its easy to cover most of the sounds
of the world, but impossible to get all of them (claims
- The Place x Manner x Voicing
model is inadequate
1) `secondary articulations'?, clicks? (there
not enough dimensions)
2) empty cells: eg, `lateral velars' `voiced glottal stops'? (dimensions
of Place and Manner are not independent)
3) Cannot represent timing patterns like VOT or C
length or overlap of gestures (nonsegmental
properties are ignored)
- The closer we look, the
more subtle features we find that
differ between languages (Phonetic
theory can't be closed
rather must be open-ended)
- Phonetic transcription seems natural to us because of our
lifelong alphabet training and experience.
Prosody (other than timing)
- People seem to have awareness
of gross sound categories,
like phonemes, but not to be aware of phonetic details. Though some
are easier to hear than others. Eg, its easy to hear stop [t] vs.
flap, or longer V in bad than bat. But its hard to hear
longer than /g/ in backer-bagger and to hear [k] as
different in cat, keep and coop.
- Phonemes: hypothesized
abstract, cognitive sound units
that closely resemble the letters of an alphabet. Units like these are
``spell'' words in human memory.
- Prosody: Languages have
conventional patterns of pitch,
loudness and timing at the level of words and phrases. But these are
difficult to describe for most languages - given current knowledge.
- Allophonic rules sometimes
cause `alternations' (eg,
Ladef, p. 39). Some rules are language specific (eg, nonaspiration of
after /s/ in store), some nearly universal (eg, nasalization of
V/_N). Be familiar with the major
English rules on my handout (and the similar set in Ladefoged Chap
4). Be able to interpret the rule notation used by Ladefoged.
- Feature analysis of
phonemes: know the main phonetic
features of the consonant phonemes of English (not the binary ones used
(Tones and Break Indices). The most useful method
for transcribing English prosody (and many other languages as
There are 3 types of tone: Pitch accents
low, L*+H scoop, L+H* rising peak, H+!H
), Phrasal tones (H-, L-)
and final boundary tones (L%, H%).
patterns are the ``Declarative phrase intonation'', List item
and Nuclear accent (a pitch accent near the end of an intonation
Acoustics of Speech
acoustic medium, wave motion, transverse vs. longitudinal wave
period, amplitude, wave velocity
additivity (superposition) property. Implications:
1) spectral representation - shows amplitude of sinusoidal
components in a complex waves
2) independence of sound sources in environment
3) filtering of selected frequencies
acoustic filter - multiplication of some amplitudes by number less than 1. The Transfer Function of a filter displays that
multiplication for each frequency.
Acoustic Theory of Speech Production: Claims that observed acoustic signals of speech result from a sound Source (from the glottal
buzz or frication) filtered by a vocal Cavities (in front of the source).
OUTPUT = SOURCE function (modified by, ie, multiplied by) a FILTER function
Cues for major classes: vowels, nasals, glides,
Vowels: Front Vs - F2 and F1 far apart.
Low: F1 low.
Place of articulation in stops and fricatives.
and F3 fall going in, rise coming out. Burst broad spectrum and weak
F2-F3 pinch going in and out. Burst opposite F2 and F3, compact
in spectrum, strong
F2 locus at 1800 Hz. Burst hi-freq (above 3500 Hz), strong
Lateral - low F2, very high F3
[w] - low F2,
slightly lowered F3
[r] - low F2
and very low F3 (below 2lHz)
Nasals. Weaker than Vs,
stronger than voiced stop. Steady-state weak resonances in formant
Place cues in formants as for stops.
Glottal stop - irregular pitch
periods (alternately strong and weak).