Phonetics

Four

Phonetics

When we speak , there is a continuous movement such organs as the tongue, the velum (soft palate), the lips and the lungs. We put spaces between individual words in the written medium but there are no similar spaces in speech. Words are linked together in speech and are normally perceived by one who does not know the language (or by a machine) as an interrupted stream of sound.    

The organs of speech

Fig 1: The organs of speech

Fig 1 shows the main organs of speech: the jaw, the lips, the teeth, the teeth ridge (usually called the alveolar ridge), the tongue, the hard palate, the soft palate (the velum), the uvula, the pharynx, the larynx, and the vocal cords.

The mobile organs are the lower jaw, the lips, the tongue, the velum, the uvula, the pharynnx and the vocal cords and, although it is possible to blearn to move each of these at will, we have most control over the jaw, lips and tongue. The tongue is, of course, a very important articulator and it can be moved into many different places and different shapes. It is usual to divide the tongue into different parts, though there are no clear dividing lines within the tongue. Fig. 2 shows the tongue on a larger scale with these parts shown: tip, blade, front, back and root. (This use of the word "front" often seems rather strange at first.)

Fig 2: Subdivisions of the tongue

Fig 2: Subdivisions of the tongue

The pharynx

i) The pharynx is a tube which begins just above the larynx. It is about 7 cm long in women and about 8 cm in men, and at its top end it is divided into two, one part being the back of the mouth and the other being the beginning of the way through the nasal cavity. If you look in your mirror with your mouth open, you can see the back of the pharynx.

The velum or soft palate

ii) The velum or soft palate is seen in the diagram in a position that allows air to pass through the nose and through the mouth. Yours is probably in that position now, but often in speech it is raised so that air cannot escape through the nose. The other important thing about the velum is that it is one of the articulators that can be touched by the tongue. When we make the sounds  k  and  g  the tongue is in contact with the lower side of the velum, and we call  these velar consonants.

The hard palate

iii) The hard palate is often called the "roof of the mouth". You can feel its smooth curved surface with your tongue.

The alveolar ridge

iv) The alveolar ridge is between the top front teeth and the hard palate. You can feel its shape with your tongue. Its surface is really much rougher than it feels, and is covered with little ridges. You can only see these if you have a mirror small enough to go inside your mouth (such as those used by dentists). Sounds made with the tongue touching here (such as  t  and  d ) are called alveolar.

The alveolar ridge

v) The tongue is, of course, a very important articulator and it can be moved into many different places and different shapes. It is usual to divide the tongue into different parts, though there are no clear dividing lines within the tongue. Fig. 2 shows the tongue on a larger scale with these parts shown: tip, blade, front, back and root. (This use of the word "front" often seems rather strange at first.)

Fig. 2 Sub-divisions of the tongue

The teeth (upper and lower)

vi) The teeth (upper and lower) are usually shown in diagrams like Fig. 1 only at the front of the mouth, immediately behind the lips. This is for the sake of a simple diagram, and you should remember that most speakers have teeth to the sides of their mouths, back almost to the soft palate. The tongue is in contact with the upper side teeth for many speech sounds. Sounds made with the tongue touching the front teeth are called dental.

The lips : bilabial, labiodental

vii) The lips are important in speech. They can be pressed together (when we produce the sounds  p , b ), brought into contact with the teeth (as in f , v), or rounded to produce the lip-shape for vowels like  uù. Sounds in which the lips are in contact with each other are called bilabial, while those with lip-to-teeth contact are called labiodental.

The seven articulators described above are the main ones used in speech, but there are three other things to remember. Firstly, the larynx could also be described as an articulator - a very complex and independent one. Secondly, the jaws are sometimes called articulators; certainly we move the lower jaw a lot in speaking. But the jaws are not articulators in the same way as the others, because they cannot themselves make contact with other articulators. Finally, although there is practically nothing that we can do with the nose and the nasal cavity, they are a very important part of our equipment for making sounds (what is sometimes called our vocal apparatus), particularly nasal consonants such as  m , n . Again, we cannot really describe the nose and the nasal cavity as articulators in the same sense as (i) to (vii) above.

Vowels and consonants

Vowels
Vowels are produced by a continuous airstream and all are voiced. They are classified according to height of the tongue, part of tongue involved, and position of the lips. The tongue can be high, mid, or low; and the part of the tongue used can be front, central or back. Only four vowels are produced with rounded lips and only four vowels are considered tense instead of lax. The sound /a/ would be written as a low back lax unrounded vowel. Many languages also have vowels called diphthongs, a sequence of two sounds, vowel + glide. Examples in English include oy in boy and ow in cow. In addition, vowels can be nasalized when they occur before nasal consonants. A diacritic mark [~] is placed over the vowel to show this. The vowel sounds in bee and bean are considered different because the sound in bean is nasalized.

		Part of Tongue
		Front	Central	Back
Tongue Height	High	i ɪ		u ʊ
	Mid	e ɛ	ə ʌ	o ɔ
	Low	æ		a

The bold vowels are tense, and the italic vowels are rounded. English also includes the diphthongs: [aj] as in bite, [aw] as in cow, and [oj] as in boy.

For the complete IPA chart with symbols for the sounds of every human language, please visit the International Phonetic Association's website. And you're looking for a way to type English IPA symbols online, please visit ipa.typeit.org

Consonants
Consonants are produced as air from the lungs is pushed through the glottis (the opening between the vocal cords) and out the mouth. They are classified according to voicing, aspiration, nasal/oral sounds, places of articulation and manners of articulation. Voicing is whether the vocal folds vibrate or not. The sound /s/ is called voiceless because there is no vibration, and the sound /z/ is called voiced because the vocal folds do vibrate (you can feel on your neck if there is vibration.) Only three sounds in English have aspiration, the sounds /b/, /p/ and /t/. An extra puff of air is pushed out when these sounds begin a word or stressed syllable. Hold a piece of paper close to your mouth when saying the words pin and spin. You should notice extra air when you say pin. Aspiration is indicated in writing with a superscript h, as in /pʰ/. Nasal sounds are produced when the velum (the soft palate located in the back of the roof of the mouth) is lowered and air is passed through the nose and mouth. Oral sounds are produced when the velum is raised and air passes only through the mouth.

Articulation

In English , the most frequently used consonants are formed on o near the alveolar ridge; in french , the favoured consonants are against the teeth; whereas in India many sounds are made with the tip of the tongue curling towards the hard palate, thus producing the retroflex sounds so characteristic of Indian languages. The most frequently occuring sounds in a language help to determine the position of the jaw, tongue, lips, and possibly even body stance when speaking. A speaker will always sound foreign in his her pronunciation of a language if the articulatory setting of its native speakers has not been adopted.   

Manners of Articulation

Stop: obstruct airstream completely
Fricative: partial obstruction with friction
Affricate: stop airstream, then release
Liquids: partial obstruction, no friction
Glides: little or no obstruction, must occur with a vowel

You should practice saying the sounds of the English alphabet to see if you can identify the places of articulation in the mouth. The sounds are described by voicing, place and then manner of articulation, so the sound /j/ would be called a voiced palatal glide and the sound /s/ would be called a voiceless alveolar fricative.

	Bilabial	Labiodental	Interdental	Alveolar	Palatal	Velar	Glottal
Stop (oral)	p b			t d		k g
Nasal (stop)	m			n		ŋ
Fricative		f v	θ ð	s z	š ž		h
Affricate					č ǰ
Glide	ʍ w				j	ʍ w	h
Liquid				l r

For rows that have two consonants, the top consonant is voiceless and the bottom consonant is voiced. Nasal stops are all voiced, as are liquids. The sound /j/ is also voiced. If sounds are in two places on the chart, that means they can be pronounced either way.

The production of speech sounds: vocal tract, articulators, articulatory phonetics.

Articulators above the larynx

All the sounds we make when we speak are the result of muscles contracting. The muscles in the chest that we use for breathing produce the flow of air that is needed for almost all speech sounds; muscles in the larynx produce many different modifications in the flow of air from the chest to the mouth. After passing through the larynx, the air goes through what we call the vocal tract, which ends at the mouth and nostrils. Here the air from the lungs escapes into the atmosphere. We have a large and complex set of muscles that can produce changes in the shape of the vocal tract, and in order to learn how the sounds of speech are produced it is necessary to become familiar with the different parts of the vocal tract. These different parts are called articulators, and the study of them is called articulatory phonetics.

Fig. 1 is a diagram that is used frequently in the study of phonetics. It represents the human head, seen from the side, displayed as though it had been cut in half. You will need to look at it carefully as the articulators are described, and you will often find it useful to have a mirror and a good light placed so that you can look at the inside of your mouth.

Major Classes of Sounds (Distinctive Features): Continuant,  Obstruent, non-continuant,  sonorant sounds

All of the classes of sounds described above can be put into more general classes that include the patterning of sounds in the world's languages. Continuant sounds indicate a continuous airflow, while non-continuant sounds indicate total obstruction of the airstream. Obstruent sounds do not allow air to escape through the nose, while sonorant sounds have a relatively free airflow through the mouth or nose. The following table summarizes this information:

	Obstruent	Sonorant
Continuant	fricatives	liquids, glides, vowels
Non-Continuant	oral stops, affricates	nasal stops

Major Class Features
[+ Consonantal] consonants
[- Consonantal] vowels

[+Sonorant] nasals, liquids, glides, vowels
[- Sonorant] stops, fricatives, affricates (obstruents)

[+ Approximant] glides [j, w]
[- Approximant] everything else

Voice Features
[+ Voice] voiced
[- Voice] voiceless

[+ Spread Glottis] aspirated [pʰ, tʰ, kʰ]
[- Spread Glottis] unaspirated

[+ Constricted Glottis] ejectives, implosives
[- Constricted Glottis] everything else

Manner Features
[+ Continuant] fricatives [f, v, s, z, š, ž, θ, ð]
[- Continuant] stops [p, b, t, d, k, g, ʔ]

[+ Nasal] nasal consonants [m, n, ŋ]
[- Nasal] all oral consonants

[+ Lateral] [l]
[- Lateral] [r]

[+ Delayed Release] affricates [č, ǰ]
[- Delayed Release] stops [p, b, t, d, k, g, ʔ]

[+ Strident] “noisy” fricatives [f, v, s, z, š, ž]
[- Strident] [?, ð, h]

Place Features
[Labial] involves lips [f, v, p, b, w]

[Coronal] alveolar ridge to palate [θ, ð, s, z, t, d, š, ž, n, r, l]
[+ Anterior] interdentals and true alveolars
[- Anterior] retroflex and palatals [š, ž, č, ǰ, j]

[Dorsal] from velum back [k, g, ŋ]

[Glottal] in larynx [h, ʔ]

Vowels
Height [± high] [± low]
Backness [± back]
Lip Rounding [± round]
Tenseness [± tense]

Whereas phonetics is the study of sounds and is concerned with the production, audition and perception of of speech sounds (called phones), phonology describes the way sounds function within a given language and operates at the level of sound systems and abstract sound units. Knowing the sounds of a language is only a small part of phonology. This importance is shown by the fact that you can change one word into another by simply changing one sound. Consider the differences between the words time and dime. The words are identical except for the first sound. [t] and [d] can therefore distinguish words, and are called contrasting sounds. They are distinctive sounds in English, and all distinctive sounds are classified as phonemes.

Places of particulation  

The eight commonest places of articulation are:

Bilabial

Labiodental

Dental

Alveolar

Palato-alveolar

Palatal

Velar

Uvular, pharyngeal and glottal sounds occur frequently in world languages, however not significant in English.

Places of Articulation

Bilabial: lips together
Labiodental: lower lip against front teeth
Interdental: tongue between teeth
Alveolar: tongue near alveolar ridge on roof of mouth (in between teeth and hard palate)
Palatal: tongue on hard palate
Velar: tongue near velum
Glottal: space between vocal folds

The following sound is not found in the English language, although it is common in languages such as French and Arabic:
Uvular: raise back of tongue to uvula (the appendage hanging down from the velum)

Acoustic Phonetics, Auditory Phonetics, Articulatory Phonetics

There are three types of the study of the sounds of language. Acoustic Phonetics is the study of the physical properties of sounds. Auditory Phonetics is the study of the way listeners perceive sounds. Articulatory 

Phonetics (the type this lesson is concerned with) is the study of how the vocal tracts produce the sounds.

The orthography (spelling) of words in misleading, especially in English. One sound can be represented by several different combinations of letters. For example, all of the following words contain the same vowel sound: he, believe, Lee, Caesar, key, amoeba, loudly, machine, people, and sea. 

The following poem illustrates this fact of English humorously (note the pronunciation of the bold words):

I take it you already know of tough and bough and cough and dough?
Some may stumble, but not you, on hiccough, thorough, slough, and through?
So now you are ready, perhaps, to learn of less familiar traps?
Beware of heard, a dreadful word, that looks like beard, but sounds like bird.
And dead, it's said like bed, not bead; for goodness' sake, don't call it deed!
Watch out for meat and great and threat. (They rhyme with suite and straight and debt.)
A moth is not a moth in mother, nor both in bother, broth in brother.
And here is not a match for there, nor dear and fear, for bear and pear.
And then there's dose and rose and lose - just look them up - and goose and choose
And cork and work and card and ward and font and front and word and sword
And do and go, then thwart and cart, come, come! I've hardly made a start.
A dreadful language? Why man alive! I've learned to talk it when I was five.
And yet to write it, the more I tried, I hadn't learned it at fifty-five.
- Author Unknown

The discrepancy between spelling and sounds led to the formation of the International Phonetics Alphabet (IPA.) The symbols used in this alphabet can be used to represent all sounds of all human languages. The following is the English Phonetic alphabet. You might want to memorize all of these symbols, as most foreign language dictionaries use the IPA.

Phonetic Alphabet for English Pronunciation
p	pill		d	dill		h	heal		ʌ	but
b	bill		n	neal		l	Leaf		aj	light
m	mill		s	seal		r	reef		ɔj	boy
f	feel		z	zeal		j	You		ɪ	bit
v	veal		č	chill		w	witch		ɛ	bet
θ	thigh		ǰ	Jill		i	beet		ʊ	foot
ð	thy		ʍ	which		e	bait		ɔ	awe
š	shill		k	kill		u	boot		a	bar
ž	azure		g	gill		o	boat		ə	sofa
t	till		ŋ	ring		æ	bat		aw	cow

Some speakers of English pronounce the words which and witch differently, but if you pronounce both words identically, just use w for both words. And the sounds /ʌ/ and /ə/ are pronounced the same, but the former is used in stressed syllables, while the latter is used in unstressed syllables. This list does not even begin to include all of the phonetic symbols though. One other symbol is the glottal stop, ʔ which is somewhat rare in English. Some linguists in the United States traditionally use different symbols than the IPA symbols. These are listed below.

U.S.		IPA
š		ʃ
ž		ʒ
č		tʃ
ǰ		dʒ
U		ʊ

The production of any speech sound involves the movement of air. Air is pushed through the lungs, larynx (vocal folds) and vocal tract (the oral and nasal cavities.) Sounds produced by using air from the lungs are called pulmonic sounds. If the air is pushed out, it is called egressive. If the air is sucked in, it is called ingressive. Sounds produced by ingressive airstreams are ejectives, implosives, and clicks. These sounds are common among African and American Indian languages. The majority of languages in the world use pulmonic egressive airstream mechanisms, and I will present only these types of sounds in this lesson.

Key terms

Acoustic phonetics: the study of the physical properties of sounds.

Auditory phonetics: the study of the way listeners perceive sounds.

Articulatory phonetics: (the type this lesson is concerned with) is the study of how the vocal tracts produce the sounds.

orthography (spelling

IPA The discrepancy between spelling and sounds led to the formation of the International Phonetics Alphabet (IPA.)

pulmonic sounds produced by using air from the lungs

ingressive: If the air is sucked in,

Sounds produced by ingressive airstreams are ejectives, implosives, and clicks.

If the air is pushed out, it is called egressive.

If the air is sucked in, it is called ingressive.

Sounds produced by ingressive airstreams are ejectives, implosives, and clicks.

These sounds are common among African and American Indian languages. The majority of languages in the world use pulmonic egressive airstream mechanisms

Key terms

Consonants: produced as air from the lungs is pushed through the glottis (the opening between the vocal cords) and out the mouth.

They are classified according to voicing, aspiration, nasal/oral sounds, places of articulation and manners of articulation.

Voicing is whether the vocal folds vibrate or not.

The sound /s/ is called voiceless because there is no vibration, and the sound /z/ is called voiced because the vocal folds do vibrate (you can feel on your neck if there is vibration.)

Only three sounds in English have aspiration, the sounds /b/, /p/ and /t/. An extra puff of air is pushed out when these sounds begin a word or stressed syllable.

Aspiration is indicated in writing with a superscript h, as in /pʰ/.

Nasal sounds are produced when the velum (the soft palate located in the back of the roof of the mouth) is lowered and air is passed through the nose and mouth.

Oral sounds are produced when the velum is raised and air passes only through the mouth.

Places of Articulation

Bilabial: lips together
Labiodental: lower lip against front teeth
Interdental: tongue between teeth
Alveolar: tongue near alveolar ridge on roof of mouth (in between teeth and hard palate)
Palatal: tongue on hard palate
Velar: tongue near velum
Glottal: space between vocal folds

The following sound is not found in the English language, although it is common in languages such as French and Arabic:
Uvular: raise back of tongue to uvula (the appendage hanging down from the velum)

Minimal Pairs

Minimal pairs are words with different meanings that have the same sounds except for one. These contrasting sounds can either be consonants or vowels. The words pin and bin are minimal pairs because they are exactly the same except for the first sound. The words read and rude are also exactly the same except for the vowel sound. The examples from above, time and dime, are also minimal pairs. In effect, words with one contrastive sound are minimal pairs. Another feature of minimal pairs is overlapping distribution. Sounds that occur in phonetic environments that are identical are said to be in overlapping distribution. The sounds of [ɪn] from pin and bin are in overlapping distribution because they occur in both words. The same is true for three and through. The sounds of [θr] is in overlapping distribution because they occur in both words as well.

Free Variation

Some words in English are pronounced differently by different speakers. This is most noticeable among American English speakers and British English speakers, as well as dialectal differences. This is evidenced in the ways neither, for example, can be pronounced. American English pronunciation is [niðər], while British English pronunciation is [najðər].

Phones and Allophones

Phonemes are not physical sounds. They are abstract mental representations of the phonological units of a language. Phones are considered to be any single speech sound of which phonemes are made. Phonemes are a family of phones regarded as a single sound and represented by the same symbol. The different phones that are the realization of a phoneme are called allophones of that phoneme. The use of allophones is not random, but rule-governed. No one is taught these rules as they are learned subconsciously when the native language is acquired. To distinguish between a phoneme and its allophones, I will use slashes // to enclose phonemes and brackets [] to enclose allophones or phones. For example, [i] and [ĩ] are allophones of the phoneme /i/; [ɪ] and [ɪ̃] are allophones of the phoneme /ɪ/.

Complementary Distribution
If two sounds are allophones of the same phoneme, they are said to be in complementary distribution. These sounds cannot occur in minimal pairs and they cannot change the meaning of otherwise identical words. If you interchange the sounds, you will only change the pronunciation of the words, not the meaning. Native speakers of the language regard the two allophones as variations of the same sound. To hear this, start to say the word cool (your lips should be pursed in anticipation of /u/ sound), but then say kill instead (with your lips still pursed.) Your pronunciation of kill should sound strange because cool and kill are pronounced with different allophones of the phoneme /k/.

Nasalized vowels are allophones of the same phoneme in English. Take, for example, the sounds in bad and ban. The phoneme is /æ/, however the allophones are [æ] and [æ̃]. Yet in French, nasalized vowels are not allophones of the same phonemes. They are separate phonemes. The words beau [bo] and bon [bõ] are not in complementary distribution because they are minimal pairs and have contrasting sounds. Changing the sounds changes the meaning of the words. This is just one example of differences between languages.

Phonological Rules
Assimilation: sounds become more like neighboring sounds, allowing for ease of articulation or pronunciation; such as vowels are nasalized before nasal consonants
- Harmony: non-adjacent vowels become more similar by sharing a feature or set of features (common in Finnish)
- Gemination: sound becomes identical to an adjacent sound
- Regressive Assimilation: sound on left is the target, and sound on right is the trigger

Dissimilation: sounds become less like neighboring sounds; these rules are quite rare, but one example in English is [fɪfθ] becoming [fɪft] (/f/ and /θ/ are both fricatives, but /t/ is a stop)

Epenthesis: insertion of a sound, e.g. Latin "homre" became Spanish "hombre"
- Prothesis: insertion of vowel sound at beginning of word
- Anaptyxis: vowel sound with predictable quality is inserted word-internally
- Paragoge: insertion of vowel sound at end of word
- Excrescence: consonant sound inserted between other consonants (also called stop-intrusion)

Deletion: deletion of a sound; e.g. French word-final consonants are deleted when the next word begins with a consonant (but are retained when the following word begins with a vowel)
- Aphaeresis: vowel sound deleted at beginning of word
- Syncope: vowel sound is deleted word-internally
- Apocope: vowel sound deleted at end of word

Metathesis: reordering of phonemes; in some dialects of English, the word asked is pronounced [æks]; children's speech shows many cases of metathesis such as aminal for animal

Lenition: consonant changes to a weaker manner of articulation; voiced stop becomes a fricative, fricative becomes a glide, etc.

Palatalization: sound becomes palatal when adjacent to a front vowel Compensatory Lengthening: sound becomes long as a result of sound loss, e.g. Latin "octo" became Italian "otto"

Assimilation in English
An interesting observation of assimilation rules is evidenced in the formation of plurals and the past tense in English. When pluralizing nouns, the last letter is pronounced as either [s], [z], or [əz]. When forming past tenses of verbs, the -ed ending is pronounced as either [t], [d], [əd]. If you were to sort words into three columns, you would be able to tell why certain words are followed by certain sounds:

Plural nouns					Hopefully, you can determine which consonants produce which sounds. In the nouns, /s/ is added after voiceless consonants, and /z/ is added after voiced consonants. /əz/ is added after sibilants. For the verbs, /t/ is added after voiceless consonants, and /d/ is added after voiced consonants. /əd/ is added after alveolar stops. The great thing about this is that no one ever taught you this in school. But thanks to linguistics, you now know why there are different sounds (because of assimiliation rules, the consonants become more like their neighboring consonants.)
/s/	/z/	/əz/
cats	dads	churches
tips	bibs	kisses
laughs	dogs	judges
Past Tense
/t/	/d/	/əd/
kissed	loved	patted
washed	jogged	waded
coughed	teased	seeded

Writing Rules
A general phonological rule is A → B / D __ E (said: A becomes B when it occurs between D and E) Other symbols in rule writing include: C = any obstruent, V = any vowel, Ø = nothing, # = word boundary, ( ) = optional, and { } = either/or. A deletion rule is A → Ø / E __ (A is deleted when it occurs after E) and an insertion rule is Ø → A / E __ (A is inserted when it occurs after E).

Alpha notation is used to collapse similar assimilation rules into one. C → [Α voice] / __ [Α voice] (An obstruent becomes voiced when it occurs before a voiced obstruent AND an obstruent becomes voiceless when it occurs before a voiceless obstruent.) Similarly, it can be used for dissimilation rules too. C → [-Α voice] / __ [Α voice] (An obstruent becomes voiced when it occurs before a voiceless obstruent AND an obstruent becomes voiceless when it occurs before a voiced obstruent.) Gemination rules are written as C1C2 → C2C2 (for example, pd → dd)

Syllable Structure

There are three peaks to a syllable: nucleus (vowel), onset (consonant before nucleus) and coda (consonant after nucleus.) The onset and coda are both optional, meaning that a syllable could contain a vowel and nothing else. The nucleus is required in every syllable by definition. The order of the peaks is always onset - nucleus - coda. All languages permit open syllables (Consonant + Vowel), but not all languages allow closed syllables (Consonant + Vowel + Consonant). Languages that only allow open syllables are called CV languages. In addition to not allowing codas, some CV languages also have constraints on the number of consonants allowed in the onset.

The sonority profile dictates that sonority must rise to the nucleus and fall to the coda in every language. The sonority scale (from most to least sonorous) is vowels - glides - liquids - nasals - obstruents. Sonority must rise in the onset, but the sounds cannot be adjacent to or share a place of articulation (except [s] in English) nor can there be more than two consonants in the onset. This explains why English allows some consonant combinations, but not others. For example, price [prajs] is a well-formed syllable and word because the sonority rises in the onset (p, an obstruent, is less sonorous than r, a liquid); however, rpice [rpajs] is not a syllable in English because the sonority does not rise in the onset.

The Maximality Condition states that onsets are as large as possible up to the well-formedness rules of a language. Onsets are always preferred over codas when syllabifying words. There are also constraints that state the maximum number of consonants between two vowels is four; onsets and codas have two consonants maximally; and onsets and codas can be bigger only at the edges of words.

Source: http://www.ielanguages.com/linguist.html

 Questions

1.      What are the three types of the study of the sounds of language? Explain in brief.

2.  Memorize the International Phonetics Alphabet (IPA) as most foreign language dictionaries use the IPA.What does the production of any speech sound involve? Explain!

4.      What are pulmonic sounds/

5.      What are  egressive and  ingressive sounds?

6.      How are consonants produced?  How are they classified?

7.      Why is the sound /s/ called voiceless? Why is the sound /z/ called voiced?

8.      What sounds in  have aspiration?

9.    Hold a piece of paper close to your mouth when saying the words pin and spin. What  should notice extra air when you say pin?

10.  How is aspiration indicated in writing?

Exercises 

1.      Give the correct technical terms for the sounds made in the following ways:

(a)    both lips coming together

(b)   the bottom lip and top teeth coming together(c)    the tongue touching the upper teeth ridge

(d)   the tongue touching the hard palate

(e)    the tongue touching the soft palate

2.      Give the correct technical term for the sounds resulting from the following closures.

1.      complete closure followed by slow release of air

2.      complete closure of the oral cavity with air diverted through the nose.

3.      Partial closure where the air stream is blocked by the tip of the tongue but allowed to escape round the sides of the tongue

4.      Incomplete closure

5.      Complete closure followed by a sudden release of air

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