Phonetics

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Overview of phonetics

• The study of speech sounds (phones)
• Articulatory phonetics
• Acoustic phonetics
• Auditory phonetics

Phonetic symbols and the International Phonetic Alphabet

• Articulatory or acoustic/auditory?
• Discrete or continuous?

Articulation

• Respiratory system and airstream mechanisms
• Laryngeal system
  • The glottis: voice, whisper, breathy voice, creaky voice
  • Voiced and voiceless consonants and vowels
  • Frequency (f0) and loudness
• Vocal tract
  • Resonance and the shape of the vocal tract
  • Pharyngeal, nasal, and oral cavities
  • Tongue, lips, lower jaw, velum
  • Tongue: position, shape
  • Lips: contact, spreading, rounding, contact with teeth
  • Velum: nasal consonants and vowels

Consonants

IPA symbols for simple pulmonic consonants:

• Voice: voiced/voiceless, voice onset time
  
• Place of articulation
  • Bilabial, labiodental
  • Interdental, dental, alveolar
  • Palato-alveolar, palatal, retroflex
    American symbol for palatal fricatives and nasal
  • Velar, uvular, pharyngeal, glottal
  • Multiple places of articulation, secondary articulation (labialization, palatalization, velarization):
    
• Manner of articulation
  • Stops (plosives)
  • Fricatives
  • Affricates:
    
    American symbols for palatal affricates
  • Approximants, glides, semivowels
  • Trills and flaps
  • Nasals
  • Laterals, liquids
  • Other airstream mechanisms
    IPA symbols for non-pulmonic consonants:
    
    • Glottalization---ejectives, implosives
    • Clicks

Vowels

IPA symbols for simple vowels:

• Shape and orientation of tongue
  • Tongue body advanced or retracted
    Front vowels Central vowels Back vowels
  • Tongue body raised or lowered: high, mid, low vowels
• Lip rounding
  American symbols for front rounded vowels
• Tenseness of gesture:
  in English, tense: [i, e, u, o], lax: others
• Nasalization, retroflex:
  
• Voicelessness:
  
• Diphthongs: [aw, aj/ay, oj/oy, ej/ey, ow], etc.

Phonetic features and natural classes

• Phonetic features
• Natural class: all segments sharing one or more features
• Additional features:
  labial, coronal (dental, alveolar, and palato-alveolar consonants are [+cor]),
  sibilant ( are [+sib]), obstruent (stops, fricatives, and affricates are [+obs]),
  sonorant ([-obs], that is, vowels, approximants, liquids, English nasals)

Suprasegmental features

• Segmental and suprasegmental features
• Length of consonants and vowels
• Relative timing and rhythm
• Intonation
• Tone
• Stress
• (Pitch accent)
• Transcribing suprasegmental features

Syllables

• Syllables and stress, accent, tone
• Sonority: the extent to which a segment can be the peak of a syllable
• Syllabic structure: onset, rime: peak (nucleus), coda
• Syllabic consonants:
  
• The psychological reality of segments and syllables

Phonetic transcription

• Narrow and broad transcription
  • Stop aspiration and release in English
  • Flapped /t/ in North American English
  • Lengthened and nasalized vowels in English
• English phones
• English dialects (accents) and the phonetic realization of phones
• Transcription practice
  1. education
  2. rhythm
  3. thank you: a. General American, b. one possible Texas dialect
  4. about: a. GenAm, b. Canadian, c. Trinidadian
  5. Tuesday: a. Received Pronunciation, b. GenAm
  6. drawing board: a. GenAm, b. one possible BrEng dialect
  7. take it apart: a. GenAm, b. broad AustrEng
  8. hablar
  9. razão
  10. jurer
  11. brown: one amazing Southern US pronunciation

Acoustic phonetics

• Periodic vibration and aperiodic turbulence (noise)
• Sound waves: simple and complex
• Fundamental frequency and harmonics
• Source (vocal fold vibration), filter (vocal tract), and and formant frequencies
• Three ways of displaying sounds: waveform (amplitude vs. time), spectrum (amplitude vs. frequency), spectrogram (frequency vs. time, with amplitude indicated by darkness)
• Formants and vowel and consonant identification
• Fricatives and noise

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