THE ADVENTURE BEGINS

Topic 2: Introduction to phonology.

Ø Children learn pronunciation by imitation. So it is important for teachers to be good role models for pronunciation.

spphonetic: the study of sounds made by humans when they talk.

phonemes: the smallest unit of sound in language which carries distinctive meaning. e.g /p/ /b/ /t/ /d/.

Tongue twister:

Definition: A phrase that is deliberately designed to be difficult to say correctly, usually because of varying combinations of similar phonemes.

Examples:

“I saw a saw that could out saw any other saw I ever saw.”

“A good cook could cook as much cookies as a good cook who could cook cookies”

“A big bug bit the little beetle but the little beetle bit the big bug back.

Speech production:

There are 3 sound (auditory) production processes

a) Initiation

b) phonation

c) articulation

Lips, Teeth, Tongue

Lips form different shapes, such as an oval, and movements in order to make different sounds. Sounds can be formed by using the teeth to shape the lips, in combination with the tongue, or to block air from escaping the mouth. The tongue moves throughout the mouth and with many of the other organs, as well as making shapes like the lips, in order to formulate speech.

Uvula

Where It All Happens
The uvula is used to make guttural sounds. It helps to make nasal consonants by stopping air from moving through the nose.

Glottis

The glottis is used in controlling the vibration made by the vocal chords, in order to make different sounds.

Alveolar Ridge

To make different sounds, known as alveolar sounds, the tongue touches the ridges found on this organ.

Hard Palate

Like the alveolar ridge, the tongue touches and taps the palate when articulating speech.

Velum (Soft Palate)

The movable velum can retract and elevate in order to separate the mouth from the nasal cavity, helping to make speech less nasally. When the tongue hits the velum, it also makes a special sound called the velar consonant.

Phonetics
In most languages the written text does not correspond to its pronunciation so that in order to describe correct pronunciation some kind of symbolic presentation is needed. Every language has a different phonetic alphabet and a different set of possible phonemes and their combinations. The number of phonetic symbols is between 20 and 60 in each language (O'Saughnessy 1987). A set of phonemes can be defined as the minimum number of symbols needed to describe every possible word in a language. In English there are about 40 phonemes (Breen et al. 1996, Donovan 1996). Due to complexity and different kind of definitions, the number of phonemes in English and most of the other languages can not be defined exactly.
Phonemes are abstract units and their pronunciation depends on contextual effects, speaker's characteristics, and emotions. During continuous speech, the articulatory movements depend on the preceding and the following phonemes. The articulators are in different position depending on the preceding one and they are preparing to the following phoneme in advance. This causes some variations on how the individual phoneme is pronounced. These variations are called allophones which are the subset of phonemes and the effect is known as coarticulation. For example, a word lice contains a light /l/ and small contains a dark /l/. These l's are the same phoneme but different allophones and have different vocal tract configurations. Another reason why the phonetic representation is not perfect, is that the speech signal is always continuous and phonetic notation is always discrete (Witten 1982). Different emotions and speaker characteristics are also impossible to describe with phonemes so the unit called phone is usually defined as an acoustic realization of a phoneme (Donovan 1996).
The phonetic alphabet is usually divided in two main categories, vowels and consonants. Vowels are always voiced sounds and they are produced with the vocal cords in vibration, while consonants may be either voiced or unvoiced. Vowels have considerably higher amplitude than consonants and they are also more stable and easier to analyze and describe acoustically. Because consonants involve very rapid changes they are more difficult to synthesize properly. The articulatory phonetics in English and Finnish are described more closely in the end of this chapter.
Some efforts to construct language-independent phonemic alphabets were made during last decades. One of the best known is perhaps IPA (International Phonetic Alphabeth) which consists of a huge set of symbols for phonemes, suprasegmentals, tones/word accent contours, and diacritics. For example, there are over twenty symbols for only fricative consonants (IPA 1998). Complexity and the use of Greek symbols makes IPA alphabet quite unsuitable for computers which usually requires standard ASCII as input. Another such kind of phonetic set is SAMPA (Speech Assessment Methods - Phonetic Alphabet) which is designed to map IPA symbols to 7-bit printable ASCII characters. In SAMPA system, the alphabets for each language are designed individually. Originally it covered European Communities languages, but the objective is to make it possible to produce a machine-readable phonetic transcription for every known human language. Alphabet known as Worldbet is another ASCII presentation for IPA symbols which is very similar to SAMPA (Altosaar et al. 1996). American linguists have developed the Arpabet phoneme alphabet to represent American English phonemes using normal ASCII characters. For example a phonetic representation in DECtalk system is based on IPA and Arpabet with some modifications and additional characters (Hallahan 1996). Few examples of different phonetic notations are given in Table 3.1.

Table 3.1. Examples of different phonetic notations.

Several other phonetic representations and alphabets are used in present systems. For example MITalk uses a set of almost 60 two-character symbols for describing phonetic segments in it (Allen et al. 1987) and it is quite common that synthesis systems use the alphabet of their own. There is still no single generally accepted phonetic alphabet.
3.3.1 English Articulatory Phonetics
Unlike in Finnish articulatory phonetics, discussed in the next chapter, the number of phonetic symbols used in English varies by different kind of definitions. Usually there are about ten to fifteen vowels and about twenty to twenty-five consonants.
English vowels may be classified by the manner or place of articulation (front-back) and by the shape of the mouth (open - close). Main vowels in English and their classification are described in Figure 3.7 below. Sometimes also some diphthongs like /ou/ in tone or /ei/ in take are described separately. Other versions of definitions of English vowels may be found for example in Rossing (1990) and O'Saughnessy (1987).

Fig. 3.7. The classification of the main vowels in English (Cawley 1996).

English consonants may be classified by the manner of articulation as plosives, fricatives, nasals, liquids, and semivowels (Cawley 1990, O'Saughnessy 1987). Plosives are known also as stop consonants. Liquids and semivowels are also defined in some publications as approximants and laterals. Further classification may be made by the place of articulation as labials (lips), dentals (teeth), alveolars (gums), palatals (palate), velars (soft palate), glottal (glottis), and labiodentals (lips and teeth). Classification of English consonants is summarized in Figure 3.8.

Fig. 3.8. Classification of English consonants (Cawley 1996).

Finally, consonants may be classified as voiced and unvoiced. Voiced consonants are:

others are unvoiced.
3.2.2 Finnish Articulatory Phonetics
There are eight vowels in Finnish. These vowels can be divided into different categories depending how they are formulated: Front/back position of tongue, wideness/roundness of the constriction position, place of the tongue (high or low), and how open or close the mouth is during articulation. Finnish vowels and their categorization are summarized in Figure 3.9.