PHONOLOG

Y
The study of sound structure in
language
Phonetics vs Phonology
■ Both involve representations of sound
 Phonetics vs Phonology
PHONETICS
 Deals with ‘actual’ physical sounds as
they are manifested in human speech.
 Concentrates on acoustic waveforms,
formant values, measurements of
duration measured in miliseconds and
of amplitude and frequency.
 Concentrates on physical principles
underlying the production of sounds.
 Considers the study of resonances and
muscles and other articulatory
structures used to produce physical
sounds.
PHONOLOGY
 Deals with an abstract cognitive system
of the rules in a mental grammar of
language sounds.
 Concerns with symbolic sounds
(cognitive abstractions of language
sounds).
 Concerns with the sounds of language.
 Concerns with rules for combining
sounds.
 Concerns with variations in
pronunciation.
Concerns of phonology
■ What the ‘sounds’ of a language are  what
sounds exist and possible in one language
and what don’t
■ Rules of combining sounds  what certain
combinations of sounds are allowed, what
are systematically impossible,
■ Variation in pronunciation  explain
general patterns in pronunciation of words
Phonetics
■ Object: Physical
- what is a sound
- how does one represent the sound of
language
■ Two basic physical aspects of speech sound
- acoustic
- articulation
Acoustic
■ Def: A sound is a complex pattern of rapid
variation in air pressure, traveling from a sound
source and striking the ear, which causes a series
of neural signals to be received in the brain.
■ Visual representation:
- waveforms
- sound spectra
- spectrograms
- waveforms
- waveforms
■ The horizontal axis  time, the beginning of each
word at the left and the end of the word at the right
■ The vertical axis  displacement of air particles,
correlates with the variation in atmospheric
pressure that affect the ear
The waveform for the "pu" portion of the word "compute," showing the
absence of marked vibrations representing near silence at the left, slow
high amplitude swings corresponding to 'p' in the middle, and quasi-
periodic cycles representing the voicing of the 'yu' vowel toward the
right.
- sound spectra
■ Three properties of sound waves
- frequency (the number of cycles per second)
measured in Hertz [Hz]
- amplitude (the extent to which an air particle
moves to and fro around its rest point in a
sound wave. The greater the amplitude, the
greater the intensity of sound, and the greater
the sensation of loudness), measured in
decibels (dB)
- phase (how far into the infinite cycle of repetition
a particular sound wave is), measured in
radians
• The image above contains the time domain waveform and spectrogram of
the sentence, "She sells sea shells.“
• The top plot displays a time domain waveform with signal amplitude as a
function of time.
• The bottom plot shows the signal's spectrogram with frequency on the
vertical axis, and time on the horizontal axis. Blue indicates larger
amplitude.
• Look at the spectrogram. Note that certain sounds such as "sh" and "s"
(sometimes called unvoiced sounds) contain a broad range higher
frequencies, while other (voiced) sounds, such as "e" or "ell", contain
mostly lower frequencies.
• Other interesting features seen in the spectrogram are the blue horizontal
bands of energy called formants.
• Formants are caused by resonance in the vocal tract, and are considered
useful features for speech recognition.
- spectrograms
■ Shows both frequency and amplitude properties as
they change over time, by adding a third dimension
of information to the display.
■ Horizontal axis  time dimension: begins at the
left, ends at the right
■ Vertical axis  frequency information, lower
frequencies at the bottom, higher frequencies at the
top
■ Darkness  amplitude, higher amplitudes are
darker, lower amplitude are lighter
■ A spectrogram is reasonably informative and
accurate display of properties of sounds
■ Less accurate than a spectrum at a single point
■ Less detail than a spectrum for the information of
amplitude
■ Less reliable visual difference in darkness
■ Inefficient (bulky and difficult to interpret

IT IS QUITE IMPRACTICAL AND ALSO UNNECESSARY TO BASE

THE SCIENTIFIC STUDY OF LANGUAGE SOUND SYSTEMS
EXCLUSIVELY ON
SPECTOGRAMS.
Articulation
How speech sound is produced:
■ The lungs drive the air coming out of our mouth
■ Air is forced out of the lungs through the vocal
folds
■ The vocal folds repeatedly block and allow air to
pass from the lungs to the vocal tract
■ The repeated movement of air would produce a
waveform
■ The wave is further shaped by the geometry of
vocal tract
■ The most important articulators (for the purpose of
studying the production of speech): lips, tongue,
palate, velum, pharynx and larynx
■ By appropriate positioning of articulators, the
shape of the vocal tract can be changed, and
consequently the sound which emerges from the
vocal tract can be changed
Organs of Speech
***