Phonetics and its types.PPTX

notes for phonetics and phonology

1. Phonetics and its Branches Sadia Malik

2. Background Millions of years of evolution have resulted in an amazing instrument: the human voice. The voice can be used to inform, persuade, trick, console, and change emotional states. “Speech was the best show man puts on.” (Benjamin Lee Whorf, 1956) Dennis Fry (1977) considers Homo loquens (Man, the Talker) as a better label for modern humans than Homo Sapiens (Wise Man/Clever Human). The process of speech communication is, in part, dependent on the nature of sound. The sounds of all the languages of the world together constitute a limited set of sounds that the human vocal tract can produce.

3. Phonetics It is the study of sounds used in speech: their physical properties, the way they are received, and coded by the brain, and the way they are produced (Rowe & Levine, 2006). Phonetics is concerned with describing the speech sounds that occur in the languages of the world, how they fall into patterns, and how they change in different circumstances ( Ladefoged , 1982). The first job of a phonetician is to try to find out what people are doing when they are talking and when they are listening to speech.

4. Phonetic Domain

5. Daniel Jones’ Opinion about Phonetics I gradually came to see that Phonetics had an important bearing on human relations – that when people of different nations pronounce each other’s languages really well (even if vocabulary & grammar not perfect), it has an astonishing effect of bringing them together, it puts people on terms of equality, a good understanding between them immediately springs up.

6. Speech Sounds To describe the speech sounds, it is necessary to know what an individual sound is and how each sound differs from all others e.g., cat, pit, sand, etc The ability to analyze a word into individual sounds does not depend on knowledge of spelling. Ambiguity can be faced in analyzing/segmenting sounds, for instance: Not/knot Psycho Grade A/gray day The sun’s rays meet/The sons raise meat.

7. Spelling & Speech Alphabetic spelling represents the pronunciation of words. However, Orthography does not represent the sounds of words in a language systematically. Identify the sounds/letters representing the sounds recurring in the following sentences: Did he believe that Ceaser could see the people seize the seas? The silly amoeba stole the key to the machine. My father wanted many a village dame badly.

8. Spelling and Sounds Did h e bel ie ve that C ea ser could s ee the p eo ple s ei ze the s ea s? The sill y am oe ba stole the k ey to the mach i ne. My f a ther w a nted m a ny a vill a ge d a me b a dly. To avoid this confusion, in the science of Phonetics, each distinct sound must have a distinct symbol to represent it and each symbol must represent one and only one distinct sound .

9. The Phonetic Alphabet The discrepancy between spelling and sounds gave rise to the movement of “spelling reformers” called orthoepists . They wanted to revise the alphabet so that one letter would correspond to one sound and one sound to one letter, thus creating a phonetic alphabet to simplify spelling. In 1888 the interest in the scientific description of speech sounds led the International Phonetic Association (IPA) to develop a phonetic alphabet to symbolize the sounds of all languages. Henry Sweet played the major role in producing a phonetic alphabet.

10. The Phonetic Alphabet Since many languages use a Roman alphabet like that used in the English writing system, the IPA utilized many Roman letters as well as invented symbols. These alphabetic characters have a consistent value, unlike ordinary characters. A phonetic alphabet should include enough symbols to represent the “crucial” linguistic differences. Among the symbols of the IPA, 107 letters represent consonants and vowels, 31 diacritics are used to modify these , and 17 additional signs indicate suprasegmental qualities such as length, tone, stress, and intonation.

11. Purposes of IPA It represents a universal system for dictionaries to follow for explaining the pronunciation of words. It records a language in a linguistic framework. It provides a basis for a writing system for a language. It can annotate acoustic and other displays in the analysis of speech.

12. Consonants in IPA

13. Vowels in IPA

14. Suprasegmental features in IPA

15. Unit of analysis in Phonetics Phone (distinct sound represented by distinct symbol) [ pæt ] square brackets to represent phonetic transcription. Diacritics marks are notations added to the main phonetic symbol to clarify details of pronunciation.

16. Branches/Domains of Phonetics

17. Acoustic Phonetics The study of acoustic phonetics was greatly enhanced in the late 19th century by the invention of the Edison phonograph . The phonograph allowed the speech signal to be recorded and then later processed and analyzed. Further advances in acoustic phonetics were made possible by the development of the telephone industry. (Incidentally, Alexander Graham Bell 's father, Alexander Melville Bell , was a phonetician.) During World War II , work at the Bell Telephone Laboratories (which invented the spectrograph ) greatly facilitated the systematic study of the spectral properties of periodic and aperiodic speech sounds, vocal tract resonances and vowel formants , voice quality , prosody , etc

18. Auditory Phonetics the perception of sounds by our auditory apparatus and the transforming of the information into a neural sign and its sending to the brain the analysis of this information by the brain which eventually leads to the decoding of the message, the understanding of the verbal message Important anatomical parts include outer ear, middle ear, inner ear, and neurons in the brains and relative parts in the brain that decode information.

19. Auditory Phonetics Keeping it very simple, we can state, that any sound coming from any source, be it a door slamming or someone speaking to you, is spreading from that source as a sound wave, causing the molecules on its way to crowd together and move apart again or in other words, to vibrate. When these vibrating air molecules reach your ear, they cause the eardrum in your middle ear to vibrate, too and this vibration is then carried on from the eardrum to the three little bones: mallet, incus and stirrup .

20. Auditory Phonetics From the stirrup, the vibration is carried on to the inner ear , and into the cochlea , a little coil-like organ filled with liquid. Inside the cochlea there are two membranes: the vestibular membrane and the basilar membrane . It is the latter that plays a central role in the act of audition, because this is, where the auditory receptor cells are located. The cells on the basilar membrane convert these vibrations into neural signals that are transmitted via the auditory nerves to the central receptor and controller of the entire process, the brain, where we identify the incoming sound as actual sound with a specific pitch.

21. Articulatory Phonetics Study of the production of speech sounds Studies the movement of different articulators (speech organs) in the production of different types of sounds Source of Airstream Airstream Movement (outward or inward) Structures of the respiratory and digestive systems

22. Organs of Speech