Phonetics: The Sounds of Language

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Part 1

Objectives

At the end of this presentation, you’ll be able to

• Define phonetics & phoneme
• Divide words into phonemes
• Define orthography and explain how the English orthographic system is limited in how it conveys the sounds of English
• Use the International Phonetic Alphabet to represent words
• Identify places of articulation
• Distinguish voiced and voiceless consonants
• Identify diphthongs
• Define and identify allomorphs

Phonetics

• Phonetics is the study of speech sounds
• Phoneme: a single sound in speech that combines with other sounds to make a morpheme
• the smallest unit of speech
• Bus = b+uh+s (3 phonemes)
• Tomato = t+oh+m+a+t+o (6 phonemes)
• Not all languages have the same phonemes

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MRI of opera singer

MRI of Beat Boxer

Places of articulation

Anatomy terms to know

• Labia = lips
• Dental = teeth
• Alveolar ridge = where your teeth meet the roof of your mouth
• Hard palate = the hard part of the roof of your mouth (toward the front)
• Velum / soft palate = the soft, flexible part of the roof of your mouth (toward the back)
• Uvula = the fleshy part that hangs down in the back of your throat
• Glottis = the opening between the vocal cords

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The Alphabet

• Orthography: The spelling system of a language
• Our alphabet doesn’t consistently reflect how letters are pronounced.
• Did he believe that Caesar could see the people seize the seas?
• My father wanted many a village game badly.
• resign, autumn, ghost, pterodactyl, write, knot
• The vs. bath
• Cute, side

Ghoti

George Bernard Shaw liked to spell fish as ghoti:

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The International Phonetic Alphabet

Diphthongs!

• A monophthong is one pure vowel sound
• A diphthong is a sequence of two vowel sounds in a row.
• Bite = ah+ee
• Bout = ah+oo
• Boy = oh+ee
• Cute = ee+oo

Voiced and voiceless consonants

Do your vocal cords vibrate?

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fine / vine

peat / beat

seal / zeal

tote / dote

choke / joke

kale / gale

breath / breathe

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Voiced consonants:

v, b, z, d, j, g, th (as in “the”), l, m, n, ng, r, w

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Voiceless consonants

ch, f, k, p, s, sh, t, th (as in “bath”)

Practice the IPA

Let’s do these together:

• cat
• dry
• white

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Try these on your own:

• rings
• treasure
• aunt
• crayons
• calls

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More manners of articulation

•Nasal and oral: Does the sound escape from your mouth or your nose?

•Stops and continuants: Can you “hold out” the sound?

•Fricatives: Does blocking the airflow cause friction, and can you “hold it out”?

•Affricatives: Do you block the airflow, then release it?

•Liquids: Is the airflow partly restricted, but without friction?

•Glides: Is there almost no airflow restriction?

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Minimal Pairs

Minimal pair: two words differentiated by only one phoneme.

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This is how we tell what a phoneme is.

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They don’t have to rhyme:

• Save / Safe
• Math / Mass
• Cab / Cat

Allomorphs

• An allomorph is one morpheme with two possible phonemes
• (allo = different; morph = morpheme)

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Examples of allomorphs

• Say the plural form of these words:

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More allomorphs

• -S, -Z, -EZ (plurals)
• ED, D, T (past-tense morphemes)
• -‘S, -’EZ (possessives)
• -S, -Z, -EZ (third person singular verbs)

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Non-English Phonemes

Non-English Phonemes

Non-English Phonemes

Non-English Phonemes

Non-English Phonemes

Non-English Phonemes

Prosodic Features: Length

• Length: how long consonants or vowels are held out (not in English).

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• Pitch: How high or low a sound is pitched, whether it rises, falls, or bends (tonal languages)

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• Stress: certain syllables louder, longer, or higher than other syllables

Prosodic Features: Pitch

Prosodic Features: Stress

French: all syllables are the same length, pitch, volume.

English: every word has at least one stressed syllable. Stress can change the meaning of a word.

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