ENG 122

Introduction to Linguistics

Phonetics

1
 The IPA
• The International Phonetic Association (IPA)
developed the International Phonetic Alphabet (also
named IPA) in 1888

• A phonetic alphabet to symbolize the sounds of all

languages

• Each symbol has a consistent value (“one sound, one

symbol”)

2
 What is phonetics?
• Phonetics is concerned with describing speech

• Articulatory phonetics: the study of how the

sounds of language are produced by the vocal
tract

• Acoustic phonetics: the study of the physical

properties of the sounds themselves (pitch,
loudness, etc.)

3
 Theoretical assumptions
• Some aspects of speech are linguistically
relevant, while other’s such as personal voice
quality are not
• Speech can be represented partly as a
sequence of discrete sounds or ‘segments’
• Segments can usefully be divided into major
categories, consonants and vowels

4
 Theoretical Assumptions
• The phonetic description of consonants and
vowels can be made with reference to how
they are produced and to their auditory
characteristics
• In addition to the segments, a number of
‘suprasegmental’ aspects of speech such as
stress and tone, need to be represented
independently of the segments
 Distinguishing segments
• Speakers are aware of the number of sounds
there are in a given word

e.g., speakers of English recognize that the word

cat has three sounds

• The ability to segment the word into parts is not

dependent on knowledge of spelling:
a. not vs. knot
b. school
6
 Evidence for segments
• Evidence that speakers are aware of segments
comes from speech errors

• a. melcome wat instead of welcome mat

• b. par cark instead of car park

• How many segments are there in the following

English words?
a. gamec. friend e. school
b. psycho d. blast
7
 The IPA consonant chart

From the IPA website: http://www.arts.gla.ac.uk/IPA/pulmonic.html

8
 The IPA consonant chart

Place of articulation
Manner of articulation

From the IPA website: http://www.arts.gla.ac.uk/IPA/pulmonic.html

9
 The IPA consonant chart

State of the glottis

From the IPA website: http://www.arts.gla.ac.uk/IPA/pulmonic.html

10
The consonants of RP English

From the IPA website: http://www.arts.gla.ac.uk/IPA/pulmonic.html

11
Place of articulation
Places of articulation
distinguished in English
sounds
Bilabial /p, b, m/
Labiodental /f, v/
Dental /θ, ð/
Alveolar /t, d, n, s, z, ɹ, l/
Postalveolar /ʃ, ʒ/
Palatal /j/

Velar /k, g, ŋ /

12
 Places of articulation
• Retroflex
In retroflex sounds the tip of the tongue is
curled back from its normal position to a point
behind the alveolar ridge, as in Hindi [ɖal]
‘branch’

• Uvular
Made by raising the back of the tongue
towards the uvular, as in French [ʁuʒ] ‘rouge’

13
 Places of Articulation
• Pharyngeal
Made by pulling the root of the tongue back
towards the wall of the pharynx, as in Arabic
[ʕamm] ‘uncle’

• Glottal
Consonants made by the vocal folds (i.e.
vocal chords). Common in some English
dialects - sometimes referred to as ‘dropping
your Ts’ as in ‘butter’ /bʌʔə/ instead of /bʌtə/
 Manner of articulation
• Plosive (or stop)
There is a complete and momentary closure of air
flow through the vocal tract /p, b, t, d, k, g/
• Nasal
There is a complete and momentary closure of air
flow through the vocal tract, but the velum is lowered
and air escapes through the nose /n, m, ŋ/
• Fricative
There is a continuous airflow passing through a very
narrow opening /f, v, θ, ð, s, z, ʃ, ʒ/

15
 Manner of articulation
• Affricate
Like a combination between a stop and a fricative.
The sound begins like a stop and a complete closure
is made, however the movement of the tongue away
from the place of articulation is slower than with a
stop, creating a period of fricative noise.
Affricates are one sound, not a sequence of two
sounds. To be considered an affricate, plosive-
fricative sequences must be homorganic (created
with the same articulators) /ʧ, ʤ/

16
 Manner of articulation
• Trill
• The tip of the tongue/lips/uvular is set in motion by
the current of air as in Spanish [pero] ‘dog’
• Tap or flap
• Caused by a single contraction of muscles so that
one articulator is thrown against the other. It is often
a very rapid articulation of a stop. When
distinguished, taps are made in the dental/alveolar
region and flaps are made in the post-alveolar region,
with a retroflex gesture. Taps are found in varieties of
English, as in American English latter, ladder, tanner

17
 Manner of articulation
• Approximant
The articulators approach each other but do not get
sufficiently close to each other to produce a
‘complete’ consonant like a plosive or fricative /ɹ, j/
• Lateral approximant
• Air escapes through the mouth along the lowered
sides of the tongue. There is no audible friction /l/
• Lateral fricative
• Air escapes through the mouth along the lowered
sides of the tongue. There is audible friction, as in
Welsh [ɬʊɪd] llwyd ‘grey’

18
State of the glottis
When voiceless sounds
are made the vocal folds
are pulled apart and air
passes directly through
the glottis

19
State of the glottis
When voiced sounds are
made the vocal folds are
brought close together
and air passes through
the glosses forcing them
to vibrate

The IPA chart

distinguishes whether
sounds are voiced or
voiceless
20
 Articulatory descriptions
• We can identify consonants on the basis of their three
main features:
State of the glottis
Place of articulation
Manner of articulation

e.g., the initial [p] in please is a voiceless bilabial stop

• You can even give the articulatory description of a

sound you may not be able to pronounce!
e.g, [B] is a voiced bilabial fricative
21
IPA vowel chart

22
 Tongue positions

http://www.phonetics.ucla.edu/vowels/chapter11/tongue.html 23
 Articulatory descriptions
• Just as we can identify consonants on the basis
of their main features, so to can we identify
vowels on the basis of their main features:
Tongue height
Tongue advancement
Lip rounding

e.g., [i] is a high front unrounded vowel

24
 Tongue height
• The tongue position ranges from being high to low (the tongue
position names in brackets are the ones used on your IPA
chart)

High (close)
High-mid (close-mid)
Mid
Low-mid (open-mid)
Low (open)

Compare the vowel sounds in

heed hid had
25
 Tongue advancement

• The tongue position ranges from being

forward to back
Front
Central
Back

Compare the vowel sounds in

heed who’d
26
 Lip rounding
• Vowels differ as to whether the lips are rounded or
unrounded (spread) when the vowel is produced

• Rounded vowel: vowel made with rounded lips

• Unrounded vowel: vowel made with unrounded lips

• In English, all the rounded vowels are back vowels,

but this is not always the case cross-linguistically…

27
 Lip rounding
• e.g., Vietnamese has back unrounded vowels
t ‘fourth’ (high back unrounded)
tu ‘to drink’ (high back rounded)
t ‘silk’ (high-mid back unrounded)
to ‘soup bowl’ (high-mid back rounded)

• e.g., Dutch has front rounded vowels

bit ‘beet (high front unrounded)
byt ‘game word’ (high front rounded)
bEt ‘bed’ (low-mid front unrounded)
p {t ‘ditch’ (low-mid front rounded)

28
 Tense/lax vowels
• Tense vowels have more “extreme” positions (tend to be further
away from mid-central

• Tense vowels are produced with greater tension of the tongue

and tend to be slightly longer

Tense vowel: vowel produced with a placement of the tongue

resulting in greater vocal tract constriction (than non-tensed
vowels)

Lax vowel: vowel produced in roughly the same position, but with
less constricted articulation
29
 Tense vowels
• British English (RP) tense vowels:
[i:] fee
[u:] boot
[A:] cart
[‰:] firm
[O:] saw

30
Simple vowels and diphthongs
• Simple vowels (a.k.a. monophthongs, pure vowels): vowels that do
not show a noticeable change in quality.

• Diphthongs: complex vowels that exhibit a change in quality within

a single syllable

• In English, diphthongs show changes in quality that are due to

tongue movement away from the initial vowel articulation towards
another position.

Try pronouncing the following words and notice your tongue

moving:
say buy cow go

31
 Airstream Mechanisms
• Sounds produced by using air from the
lungs are called pulmonic sounds.
• Since the air is pushed out, they are
called egressive.
• The majority of sounds used in
languages of the world are produced by
a pulmonic egressive airstream
mechanism.
32
 Airstream Mechanisms
• Other airstream mechanisms are
ejectives, implosives and clicks.
• When air is sucked in instead of flowing
out, ingressive sounds, like implosives
and clicks, are produced.
• When the air in the mouth is pushed out
, ejectives are produced.

33
 Segmental vs
Suprasegmental Features
• Length, intonation, tone and stress are
suprasegmental features.
• It is often difficult or even impossible to
identify the quality of a suprasegmental
feature if you hear just one segment.
• One has to compare different segments
and utterances to see what the features
are.
34
 Length
• Some speech sounds are longer than
others.
• In some languages a difference in length
changes the meaning.
• One has to compare the duration of any
given segment with the durations of the
other segments to figure out if it was
long or short.
35
 Intonation
• Voiced speech sounds, particularly vowels,
may be produced with different pitches.
• Pitch is the psychological correlate of
fundamental frequency, which depends on
the rate of vibration of the vocal folds.
• The pattern of pitch movements across a
stretch of speech such as a sentence is
commonly known as intonation.

36
 Tone
• In many languages, the pitch at which the
syllables in a word are pronounced can
make a difference in the word’s meaning.
• Such languages are called tone
languages.
• In tone languages, tones can be of two
types: either level or contour.
• Punjabi: kora, cha, kera
37
 Stress
• Stress, like tone, is a property of entire
syllable, not just segments.
• A stressed vowel is louder and slightly
higher in pitch, and somewhat longer
than an unstressed one.
• Pairs of word strings which are identical
segmentally can, nevertheless, be
distinguished by the location of stress.
38
• Photograph vs photography

• Bláckboard vs black bóard

• How about,
Record, perfect, and subject
 Acoustic Phonetics
• Focuses on the physical aspects of the sound
wave.

• One of the ways to capture speech sounds is

to transcribe it using phonetic symbols.
• But transcription runs the risk of involving
endless debate about what a speaker actually
said.
 Simple Sound Waves
• Speech sounds are disturbances in the
air set off by a movement of some sort.
• One kind of movement that can set off a
sound wave is vibration.
• Since air molecules prefer to remain
equidistant from each other, it results in
two physical phenomenon –
compression and rarefaction.
 Simple Sound Waves
• There is compression when air molecules
are crowded together than usual.
• There is rarefaction when air molecules are
spread farther apart than usual.

• The consequences of the movement may be

transmitted over a large distance while each
individual molecule simply vibrates in place.
 Simple Sound Waves
• When a chain reaction caused due to the
movement of vibrating objects such as a
blade of steel, produces sound waves.
• When the blade moves back and forth at a
certain frequency, a group of air molecules
which are at some distance from the string
will alternately be compressed and rarefied at
that frequency.
• A sound wave such as this, which repeats at
regular intervals, is called a periodic wave.
 Simple Sound Waves
• Air molecules can vibrate at many
different frequencies.
• When they vibrate at rates from 20 to
20,000 times a second, the vibration is
perceived as sound.
• However, we don’t really use this whole
range for speech.
 Complex Sound Waves
• The result of the parts of an object (say
guitar string or vocal folds), vibrating in
different ways simultaneously is a
complex wave.

• Complex waves can be seen as a

combination of several simple waves.
 Complex Sound Waves
• The complex wave is composed of a
fundamental wave which repeats itself
at the frequency of the opening and
closing of the vocal folds.
• Consequently, we get a set of
harmonics which repeat at frequencies
which are multiples of the fundamental.
 Complex Sound Waves
• The complex wave produced by the vocal
folds is known as the source wave, because
the vocal folds are the source of the sound
wave.
• As this sound wave passes through the vocal
tract, the articulators shape it, or filter it,
boosting the energy at some harmonic
frequencies and damping the energy at
others.
 Vowels
• In the production of vowels, the filtering effect
of the vocal tract produces amplitude peaks
at certain frequencies by enhancing the
harmonics at those frequencies while
damping harmonics at other frequencies.
• The peaks in the filter function are called
formants.
• The resonant frequencies of the vocal tract
are vowel formants.
 Vowels
• Vowels have several formants, the first
three of which are the most important
for speech perception.
• The values of these formants differ from
vowel to vowel.
• We can plot these vowels by the
frequencies of their first two formants.
 Vowels
• The first formant corresponds inversely
to the height dimension – high vowels
have a low F1 and low vowels have a
high F1.
• The second formant corresponds to the
advancement dimension – front vowels
have a high F2 and back vowels have a
low F2.
 Spectrogram
• A common method of representing acoustic
properties of speech sounds is to use a
spectrogram.
• Spectrograms are graphs that encode three acoustic
dimensions.
• The vertical axis represents frequency.
• The horizontal axis represents time.
• A third dimension is represented by the degree of
darkness that indicates the amount of acoustic
energy present at a certain time at a certain
frequency.
 Spectrogram
• Dark horizontal bands usually represent
formants because formants represent
enhanced bands of energy at particular
frequencies.
• The spectrogram show visually the
differences that we hear when we listen
to various speech sounds.
 Stops
• Stop consonants are produced by completely
closing off the oral cavity with the lip or
tongue, blocking the air flow.
• This lack of airflow makes stops easy to
detect on spectrograms because they are
characterized by a lack of energy- hence a
gap- in the display.
• So, the acoustic characteristic of a stop
reflects its manner of articulation.
 Stops
• If a stop is voiced, the vocal folds will actually
be vibrating during the closure, and so low
frequency noise is produced.
• This noise can be seen as the dark band at
the very bottom of the spectrogram during the
“silence” of the stop. This band is called
voice bar.
• Voiceless stops never have this voice bar.
 Fricatives
• The difference between the noise found in
vowels and in fricatives is that the sound in
vowels has its source in the periodic vibration
of the vocal folds, while the sound in fricatives
comes from the aperiodic, or random,
turbulence of the air rushing through a small
opening.
• We find differences among fricatives in the
relative frequency of the noise, amplitude and
duration.
 Fricatives
• Voiced fricatives are interesting in that they
combine periodic noise and a periodic noise.
• Affricates are sequences of stop plus fricative
both in their articulation and their acoustic
characteristics.
• A spectrogram of an affricate begins with a
gap in the wave form, which is immediately
followed by the aperiodicity of a fricative.
 Nasals
• In the production of a nasal, the oral
cavity is closed as if for a stop, but air
escapes past the lowered velum
through the nasal cavity.
• In acoustic terms, the nasal passage
serves as a filter for the voice source,
just as the oral cavity acts as a filter in
vowels.