SPEECH PRODUCTION:
Making speech is the way that people can hear it happen because of the movement of the tongue and lips so that it can be heard and recognized. When we are producing any sound we will need energy. When you talk, air from the lungs will pass between two small muscular folds called the vocal folds. Sounds produced when the vocal folds are vibrating are said to be voiced, as opposed to those in which the vocal folds are apart, which are said to be voiceless. The difference between a voiced and a voiceless sound, try saying a long ‘v’ sound, which we will symbolize as [v ]. Now compare this with a long ‘f’ sound [ f ], saying each of them alternately.Both of these sounds are formed in the same way in the mouth. The difference between them is that [v ] is voiced and [ f ] is voice-less. The air passages above the larynx are known as the vocal tract. The parts of the vocal tract that can be used to form sounds, such as the tongue and the lips, are called articulators.
The airstream going out through the mouth, as in [ v ] or [ z ], or the nose, as in [ m ] and [ n ], is determined by the oro-nasal process. The movements of the tongue and lips interacting with the roof of the mouth and the pharynx are part of the articulatory process.
The Vocal Track: front to back
The lips: The p sound , b sound, and m sound are created by pressing the lips together, while forming the sound and y sound requires interaction between the bottom lip and the top teeth.
The tip of the tongue and the front teeth:The unvoiced Th and Th sounds are created by controlling how the close the tip of the tongue is to the front teeth.
The front of the tongue (including the tip) and the tooth ridge: The tooth ridge is the bony bump directly behind the top front teeth (behind the tooth ridge is the hard palate). Accuracy of tongue position in relation to the tooth ridge is necessary for production of the t sound, d sound, ch sound, j sound, s sound,z sound, sh sound, zh sound, I sound, and n sound.
The back of the tongue and the soft palate: The soft palate is the fleshy area at the top, back of the mouth. The back of the tongue interacts with the soft palate to create the k sound, g sound, and ng sound.
The deep back of the tongue and the throat: The h sound is created by constricting the area at the very back of the mouth.
Sound wave
The result of the passage of air through the glottis is the issuance of a series of successive puffs of air at the rate of opening and closure of the vocal cords For the production of the sound wave of air molecules must enter vibration, which is achieved by passing through the creases vowels. "Sound wave: spread of a disturbance on a material medium such as air, in the form of a series of compressions and alternate rarefactions affecting each particle components of this medium."
PLACES OF ARTICULATORY GESTURES
The parts of the vocal tract that can be used to form sounds are called articulators.The principal terms for the particular types of obstruction required in the description of English are as follows. 1. Bilabial (Made with the two lips.) such as words pie, buy, my
2. Labiodental (Lower lip and upper front teeth.) words such as fie and vie
3. Dental (Tongue tip or blade and upper front teeth.) Say the words thigh, thy. 4. Alveolar (Tongue tip or blade and the alveolar ridge words such as tie, die, nigh, sigh, zeal, lie
5. Retroflex (Tongue tip and the back of the alveolar ridge.) words such as rye, row, ray with retroflex sounds..
6. Palato-Alveolar (Tongue blade and the back of the alveolar ridge.) words such as shy, she, show.
7. Palatal (Front of the tongue and hard palate.)
8. Velar (Back of the tongue and soft palate.) The consonants that have the place of articulation farthest back in English are those that occur at the end of hack, hag, hang.
ORO NASAL PROCESS
The oro-nasal process
Regardless of which airstream mechanism is used, speech sounds are produced when the moving air is somehow obstructed within the vocal tract. The vocal tract consists of three joined cavities: the oral cavity, the nasal cavity, and the pharyngeal cavity. The surfaces and boundaries of these cavities are known as the organs of speech. Consider the consonants at the ends of rang, ran, ram. When you say these con-sonants by themselves, note that the air is coming out through the nose. What happens to the air within these cavities is known as the oro-nasal process.
Stop (Complete closure of the articulators involved so that the airstream cannot escape through the mouth.) There are two possible types of stop. Oral stop If, in addition to the articulatory closure in the mouth, the soft pal-ate is raised so that the nasal tract is blocked off, then the airstream will be completely obstructed. Pressure in the mouth will build up and an oral stop will be formed. the words pie, buy (bilabial closure), tie, dye (alveolar closure), and kye, guy (velar clo-sure). Nasal stop If the air is stopped in the oral cavity but the soft palate is down so that air can go out through the nose, the sound produced is a nasal stop. Sounds of this kind occur at the beginning of the words my (bilabial closure) and nigh (alveolar closure), and at the end of the word sang (velar closure). Approximant (A gesture in which one articulator is close to another, but without the vocal tract being narrowed to such an extent that a turbulent airstream is produced.) In say-ing the first sound in yacht, the front of the tongue is raised toward the palatal area of the roof of the mouth, but it does not come close enough for a fricative sound to be produced. Lateral (Approximant) (Obstruction of the airstream at a point along the center of the oral tract, with incomplete closure between one or both sides of the tongue and the roof of the mouth the word lie The consonants in words such as lie, laugh are alveolar lateral approximants, but they are usually called just alveo-lar laterals, Additional Consonantal Gestures This kind of combination of a stop imme-diately followed by a fricative is called an affricate, in this case a palato-alveolar (or post-alveolar) affricate. There is a voiceless affricate at the beginning and end of the word church.
MANNER OF ARTICULATION
1) Sounds that completely stop the stream of exhaled air are called plosives: [d], [t], [b], [p], and [g], [k], glottal stop. Another word for plosive is stop (nasals are also stops, however, since the air is stopped in the oral cavity during their production).
2) Sound produced by a near complete stoppage of air are called fricatives: [s], [z], [f], [v], [T], [D], [x], [V], [h], pharyngeals.
3) Sometimes a plosive and a fricative will occur together as a single, composite sound called an affricate: [tS], [ts], [dz], [dZ], [pf].
4) All other types of continuant are produced by relatively slight constriction of the oral cavity and are called approximants. Approximants are those sounds that do not show the same high degree of constriction as fricatives but are more constricted than are vowels. During the production of an approximant, the air flow is smooth rather than turbulent. There are four types of approximants.
a) The glottis is slightly constricted to produce [h], a glottalic approximant.
b) If slight stricture occurs between the roof of the mouth and the tongue a palatal glide is produced [j]. If the constriction is between the two lips, a labiovelar glide is produced. The glides [j] and [w] are also called semivowels, since they are close to vowels in degree of blockage.
c) If the stricture is in the middle of the mouth, and the air flows out around the sides of the tongue, a lateral is produced. Laterals, or lateral approximants, are the various l-sounds that occur in language. In terms of phonetic features, l-sounds are + lateral, while all other sounds are + central.
d) The third type of approximant includes any of the various R-sounds that are not characterized by a flapping or trilling: alveolar and retroflex approximants. This includes the American English r (symbolized in the IPA by an upside down [®], but we will use the symbol [r]).
It the air flow is obstructed only for a brief moment by the touch of the tongue tip against the teeth or alveolar ridge, a tap, or tapped [|] is produced: cf. Am Engl ladder; British Engl. very. If the tongue tip is actually set in motion by the flow of air so that is vibrates once, a flap or flapped r is produced: this is the sound of the Spanish single r. Flaps can even be labio-dental, as in one African language, Margi, spoken in Northern Nigeria. If the air flow is set into turbulence several times in quick succession, a trill is produced. Trills may be alveolar, produced by the apex of the tongue: the Spanish double rr perro; the French uvular [R]: de rien; Bilabial trills [B] have been found to occur in two languages of New Guinea: mBulei = rat in Titan.
 THE WAVEFORMS OF CONSONANTS
At this stage, we will not go too deeply into the acoustics of consonants, simply noting a few distinctive points about their waveforms. The places of articulation are not obvious in any waveform, but the differences in some of the principal.
THE ARTICULATION OF VOWEL SOUNDS
In the production of vowel sounds, the articulators do not come very close to-gether, and the passage of the airstream is relatively unobstructed.
The positions of the vocal organs for the vowels in the words 1 heed, 2 hid,
3 head, 4 had, 5 father, 6 good, 7 food. The lip positions for vowels 2, 3, and 4 are between those shown for 1 and 5. The lip position for vowel 6 is between those shown for 1 and 7.
THE SOUNDS OF VOWELS
saying just the vowels in the words heed, hid, head, had, hod, hawed, hood, who’d, making all of them long vowels. Now whisper these vowels. When you whisper, the vocal folds are not vibrating, and there is no regular pitch of the voice. Nevertheless, you can hear that this set of vowels forms a series of sounds on a continuously descending pitch. What you are hearing corresponds to a group of overtones that characterize the vowels. These overtones are highest for the vowel in heed and lowest for the vowel in either hawed, hood, or who’d. Which of the three vowels is the lowest depends on your regional accent.
SUPRASEGMENTALS
Super-imposed on the syllables are other features known as suprasegmentals. These include variations in stress and pitch. Variations in length are also usually con-sidered to be suprasegmental features, although they can affect single segments as well as whole syllables.
When words are composed of more than one syllable, we need to pay attention to which syllable takes the primary stress. For example:
guesses 2 syllables guésses
waited 2 syllables wáited
develop 3 syllables devélop
experiment 4 syllables expériment
CHAPTER 2 (PHONOLOGY & PHONETIC TRANSCRIPTION)
What is phonetician? A phonetician is a person who can describe speech, who understands the mechanisms of speech production
What are phonemes? When two sounds can be used to differentiate words, they are said to belong to different phonemes.
THE TRANSCRIPTION OF VOWELS
The transcription of the contrasting vowels (the vowel phonemes) in English is more difficult than the transcription of consonants for two reasons. First, accents of English differ more in their use of vowels than in their use of consonants. Second, authorities differ in their views of what constitutes an appropriate description of vowels.
CONSONANT AND VOWEL CHARTS
A phonetic chart of the English consonants we have dealt with so far. Whenever there are two symbols within a single cell, the one on the left represents a voiceless sound. All other symbols represent voiced sounds. Note also the consonant [ h ], which is not on this chart, and the affricates [ tS, dZ ], which are sequences of symbols on the chart.The airstream process involves pushing air out of the lungs for all the sounds of English. The phonation process is responsible for the gestures of the vocal folds that distinguish voiced and voiceless sounds, and the oro-nasal process will be active in raising and lowering the velum so as to distinguish nasal and oral sounds.
PHONOLOGY
Some of the phoneme symbols may represent different sounds when they occur in different contexts. For example, the symbol / t / may represent a wide variety of sounds. In tap / tœp /, it represents a voiceless alveolar stop. But the / t / in eighth / eItT / may be made on the teeth, because of the influ-ence of the following voiceless dental fricative / T /. This / t / is more accurately called a voiceless dental stop, and we will later use a special symbol for tran-scribing it. In most forms of both British and American English, the / t / in bitten is accompanied by a glottal stop, and we will also be using a special symbol for this sound. As we saw, for most Americans and for many younger British English speakers, the / t / in catty / "kœti / symbolizes a voiced, not a voiceless, sound. All these different sounds are part of the / t / phoneme. Each of them oc-curs in a specific place: / t / before / T / is a dental stop, / t / before a word final / n / is a glottal stop, and / t / after a vowel and before an unstressed vowel is a voiced stop.
Note :
Small marks that can be added to a symbol to modify its value are known as diacritics.
The variants of the phonemes that occur in detailed phonetic transcriptions are known as allophones.
A transcription that shows the allophones in this way is called a completely systematic phonetic transcription.
CHAPTER 3 (CONSONANT AND VOWEL CHARTS)
he pronunciation of consonants that have different places of articulation. The stops [ p, t, k ] are illustrated in the nonsense utterances [ hEpa, hEta, hEka ]. These stops are said to be bilabial, alveolar, and velar.
STOP CONSONANTS
Most people have very little voicing going on while the lips are closed during either pie or buy stop consonants are essentially voiceless. But in pie, after the release of the lip closure, there is a moment of aspiration, a period of voicelessness after the stop articulation and before the start of the voicing for the vowel. If you put your hand in front of your lips while saying pie, you can feel the burst of air that comes out during the period of voicelessness after the release of the stop.
There is no opposition in English be-tween words beginning with / sp / and / sb /, or / st / and / sd /, or / sk / and / sg /. English spelling has words beginning with sp, st, sc, or sk, and none that begin with sb, sd, or sg, but the stops that occur after / s / are really somewhere be-tween initial / p / and / b /, / t / and / d /, / k / and / g /, and usually more like the so-called voiced stops / b, d, g / in that they are completely unaspirated.The consonants at the end of nap, mat, knack are certainly voiceless. But if you listen carefully to the sounds at the end of the words nab, mad, nag, you may find that the so-called voiced consonants / b, d, g / have very little voicing and might also be called voiceless.The sounds [ p, t, k ] are not the only voiceless stops that occur in English. Many people also pronounce a glottal stop in some words. A glottal stop is the sound (or, to be more exact, the lack of sound) that occurs when the vocal folds are held tightly together. As we have seen, the symbol for a glottal stop is [ / ], resembling a question mark without the dot.Glottal stops occur whenever one coughs.Glottal stops frequently occur as allophones of / t /. Probably most Americans and many British speakers have a glottal stop followed by a syllabic nasal in words such as beaten, kitten, fatten [ "bi/n`, "kI/n`, "fœ/n`].When two sounds have the same place of articulation, they are said to be homorganic. Thus, the consonants [ d ] and [ n ], which are both articulated on the alveolar ridge, are homorganic.
FRICATIVES
When a vowel occurs before one of the voiceless stops / p, t, k /, it is shorter than it would be before one of the voiced stops / b, d, g /. The same kind of difference in vowel length occurs before voiceless and voiced fricatives. The vowel is shorter in the first word of each of the pairs strife, strive [ straIf, straIv ]; teeth, teethe [ tiT, tiD ]; rice, rise [ raIs, raIz ]; mission, vision [ "mISn`, "vIZn ]. Stops and fricatives are the only English consonants that can be either voiced or voiceless.
we refer to fricatives and stops together as a natural class of sounds called obstruents.
AFFRICATES
This is a convenient place to review the status of affricates in English. An affricate is simply a sequence of a stop followed by a homorganic fricative. Some such se-quences, for example the dental affricate [ tT ] as in eighth or the alveolar affricate [ ts ] as in cats, have been given no special status in English phonology.
NASALS
The nasal consonants of English vary even less than the fricatives. Nasals, to-gether with [ r, l ], can be syllabic when they occur at the end of words the words sadden, table as [ "sœdn`, "teIbl `]. In most pronunciations, prism, prison can be transcribed [ "prIzm`, "prIzn
APPROXIMANTS
The voiced approximants are / w, r, j, l / as in whack, rack, yak, lack. The first three of these sounds are central approximants, and the last is a lateral approximant. The approximants / r, w, l / combine with stops in words such as pray, bray, tray, dray, Cray, gray, twin, dwell, quell, Gwen, play, blade, clay, glaze. The approximants are largely voiceless when they follow one of the voiceless stops / p, t, k / as in play, twice, clay.
OVERLAPPING GESTURES
All the sounds we have been considering involve movements of the articulators. This makes it easier to understand the overlapping of consonant and vowel gestures in words such as bib, did, gig, men-tioned earlier in this chapter. As we noted, in the first word, bib, the tongue tip is behind the lower front teeth throughout the word. In the second word, did, the tip of the tongue goes up for the first / d / and remains close to the alveolar ridge dur-ing the vowel so that it is ready for the second / d /. In the third word, gig, the backof the tongue is raised for the first / g / and remains near the soft palate during the vowel. In all these cases, the gestures for the vowels and consonants overlap.
Some diacritics that modify the value of a symbol.
RULES FOR ENGLISH CONSONANT ALLOPHONES 1. Voiceless stops (i.e., / p, t, k /) are aspirated when they are syllable initial, as in words such as pip, test, kick [ pÓIp, tÓ”st, kÓIk ].
2. Obstruents—stops and fricatives—classified as voiced (that is, / b, d, g, v, D, z, Z / ) are voiced through only a small part of the articulation when they occur at the end of an utterance or before a voiceless sound. Listen to the / v / when you say try to improve, and the / d / when you say add two
3.So-called voiced stops and affricates / b, d, g, dZ / are voiceless when syl-lable initial, except when immediately preceded by a voiced sound (as in a day as compared with this day). Use WaveSurfer to listen to the sday part of this day. Does it sound like stay?
4. Voiceless stops / p, t, k / are unaspirated after / s / in words such as spew, stew, skew.
5.Voiceless obstruents / p, t, k, tS, f, T, s, S / are longer than the corre-sponding voiced obstruents / b, d, g, dZ, v, D, z, Z / when at the end of a syllable.
6. The approximants / w, r, j, l / are at least partially voiceless when they occur after initial / p, t, k /, as in play, twin, cue [ pl 9eI, tw9In, ukj].
7.The gestures for consecutive stops overlap, so that stops are unexploded when they occur before another stop in words such as apt [ œp}t ] and rubbed [ rØb}d ].
8.In many accents of English, syllable final / p, t, k / are accompanied by an overlapping glottal stop gesture, as in pronunciations of tip, pit, kick as [ tI/°p,pI/°t, kI/°k]. (This is another case where transcription cannot fully describe what is going on.)
Note
1. Bilabial Implosive
a. Articulator : Lower Lip
b. Point of articulator : Upper Lip
c. Voice : Voiced
2. Bilabial Ejective
a. Articulator : Lower Lip
b. Point of articulator : Upper Lip
c. Voice : Voiceless
3. Bilabial Click
a. Articulator : Lower Lip
b. Point of articulator : Upper Lip
c. Voice : Voiceless
4. Alveolar Click
a. Articulator : Tip/Blade of the tongue
b. Point of articulator : Alveolar ridge / post alveolar region
c. Voice : Voiceless
5. Voiced Palatal Implosive
a. Articulator : Front/Middle Tongue
b. Point of articulator : Hard Palate
c. Voice : Voiced
6. Alveolar Lateral Click
a. Articulator : Tip and sides tongue
b. Point of articulator : Alveolar ridge
c. Voice : Voiceless
7. Alveolar Fricative Ejective
a. Articulator : Tip of the tongue
b. Point of articulator : Alveolar ridge
c. Voice : Voiceless
8. Dental Click
a. Articulator : Tip of the tongue
b. Point of articulator : Back of the front teeth
c. Voice : Voiceless
9. Voiced Dental/Alveolar Implosive
a. Articulator : Tip of the tongue
b. Point of articulator : Back of the front teeth
c. Voice : Voiced
10. Dental Alveolar Ejective
a. Articulator : Tip of the tongue
b. Point of articulator : Back of the front teeth
c. Voice : Voiceless
11. Velar Ejective
a. Articulator : Back tongue
b. Point of articulator : Velum
c. Voice : Voiceless
12. Voiced Uvular Implosive
a. Articulator : Back of the tongue
b. Point of articulator : Uvula
c. Voice : Voiced
Note :
Consonant Pulmonic (Voice Bilabial Plosive) Consonant Non Pulmonic (Bilabial Click)
DIACRITIC
We have known how the transcription of English can be made more detailed by the use of diacritics, small marks added to a symbol to narrow its meaning. Note that the nasalization diacritic is a small wavy line above a symbol (the “tilde” symbol), and the velarization dia-critic is a tilde through the middle of a symbol. Nasalization is more common among vowels.
IPA DIACRITIC with descender
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