Instituto Superior San Pío X

ENGLISH PHONETICS I
Sub. Teacher: Agustín Palavecino

/fəˈnetɪks/
 Let’s break the ice!

• Have you got a mobile

phone? Why don’t we
use it for a poll?

• No wifi/mobile data?

Network: Agustín
Password: staff817
What’s “Phonetics”? 1

• Branch of linguistics
• Deals with speech sounds and their production,
combination, description and representation by 2
written symbols.
• A part of the wider field of linguistics , which
studies language as a whole.
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(Other branches of linguistics are:
Syntax: formation and structure of sentence.
Semantics: meanings.
Morphology: formation of words.)
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What’s “Phonetics”? 1

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What’s “Phonetics”? 1

• Concerned with the sounds we make in speech:

1) How we produce sounds.
2) How these sounds are transferred from the speaker to 2
the hearer as sound waves.
3) How we hear and perceive sounds.

• Branches of Phonetics 3
-Articulatory phonetics: production of sounds
-Acoustic phonetics: vibration of speech sounds
-Auditory phonetics: how sounds are heard/perceived.
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Production of sounds

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KEY LANGUAGE!

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Production of sounds

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In speech, air passes through a complex passageway (the
lungs, the trachea or windpipe, the vocal folds, the throat,
the mouth, and the nose).
W
To describe how sounds are made, it’s important to
become familiar with anatomy involved in speech
production.
T

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Production of sounds

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1) The lungs start the process of speech production by
pushing air upwards.
2) The vocal folds, which are located in the larynx behind
the Adam’s apple, vibrate, and cause the air that flows W
between them to vibrate too.
3) The vibrating airstream is then modified according to
the shape of the vocal tract – the throat, mouth, and nasal
cavity. T

4) By moving our tongue and lips, we can produce a large

number of modifications on the vibrating air stream, and
thus, a wide variety of sounds. F
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The primary vocal organs

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RECAP! True or false?

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Phonemic chart
-Set of symbols that represent all the sounds in spoken
English. T
-Adrian Underhill created the most famous one in common
use
-Useful because spelling doesn’t always tell us how a Word W
is going to sound = pronunciation ir arbitrary
-If we write the pronunciation of a word using the symbols
of the chart, we can clearly show how it sounds
-Dictionaries include phonemic transcriptions for this T
reason.
-Useful for practising pronunciation as it helps us visualise
individual sounds that are difficult in English F
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Phonemic chart

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Phonemic chart
-Let’s check out this interactive chart with Lucy!
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https://englishwithlucy.co.uk/phonemic-chart/

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What’s a “phoneme”?
-The smallest unit of speech that distinguishes one word
(or word element) from another. T

tap -> tab -> tag -> tan

W
-A phoneme may have more than one varient, called
allophone.

Pat -> spat -> tap differ slightly phonetically but T

without significance

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What’s a “phoneme”?
-Phonemes are based on spoken language and may be
recorded with special symbols, such as T
those of the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA).

-In transcription, linguists conventionally place W

symbols for phonemes between slash marks: /p/.

-The term phoneme is usually restricted to vowels and

consonants. T

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Allophones

T
-Allophones are the different realizations of a phoneme
depending on the phonetic environment the phoneme
occurs in. The production of any of the contextual variants
W
of a phoneme does not convey differences in meaning,
thus, they are non- contrastive. The term
comes from Greek ἄλλος ‘other’ and φωνή ‘sound,
articulated sound’. T

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Allophones
More examples!
T

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Allophones
More examples!
T

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Minimal pairs
-Phonemes are the linguistically contrastive or significant
sounds (or sets of sounds) of a language. T
-This contrast is usually demonstrated by the existence of
minimal pairs.
-Minimal pairs are pairs of words which vary only by the W
identity of the segment (a single speech sound) at a single
location in the word (eg. [mæt] and [kæt]).

Examples: T
/pɪn/ vs /bɪn/ vs /tɪn/ vs /dɪn/ vs /kɪn/
/ɡɐn/ vs /pɐn/ vs /bɐn/ vs /tɐn/ vs /dɐn/
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Final words!

Write only ONE WORD that represents a concept, an idea, T

or anything that you learnt in today’s class.

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ENGLISH PHONETICS I
THANK YOU!!!

/ˈθæŋk ˌjuː/ !!!