Phonetics ~ Class 9

CD 233

Lavoie

Today’s goals

Review articulation of vowels and consonants

Understand phonemes and allophones

Experiment with Palatography

For yourself before we start

Write down:

Descriptors of vowels

Descriptors of consonants

Draw mid-sagittal sections of m and g

Review vowel articulation

What are the dimensions we use to describe vowels?

Where do the English vowels fall along those dimensions?

Review consonant articulation

Descriptors of a consonant Manner

Stop, Fricative, Affricate, Liquid, Glide

Place Bilabial, labiodental, interdental, alveolar,

palatal, velar, glottal

Voicing (voiced or voiceless) Nasality (nasal or oral)

Experiment with place

Run tongue tip from between teeth to as far back as you can go

Now make a sequence of p, f, th, s, t, sh, ch, k, glottal stop

How far apart are each of these places?

Interpreting sagittal sections

The “small articulation heads”

What sound is being articulated? Voicing (look at glottis) Nasality (look at position of velum) Place (look at where articulators approach) Manner (look at how close the articulators

are)

Limitations of mid-sagittal plane

Mid-sagittal does not show pattern of tongue contact on palate

Palatography (static, dynamic) shows: Tongue to palate (linguopalatal) contact Palate to tongue (palatolingual) contact

palatography

Palatography

What pattern does our tongue make on our hard palate when articulating a sound?

See additional handouts

Palatography yields …

Palatogram Linguagram

Capturing palate images

Static palatography

The charcoal method works for a single sound Imagine and draw the contact pattern of the

tongue on the palate when you are sipping from a straw

Now imagine and sketch t, d; s, sh, z, zh, l References if needed:

http://www.linguistics.ucla.edu/faciliti/facilities/physiology/static_pal_new/webpal.htm

http://www2.hawaii.edu/~vanderso/LDC.pdf

Dynamic palatography

You really want to know the pattern of contact over time!

But the charcoal method would just make a big black mess and obscure individual contact

That’s where EPG – electropalatography – comes in

Uses a pseudopalate (like a retainer)

/t/ /k/

Pseudopalate and digital display

Clinical uses (Michi et al 1986)

Dynamic palatography generates visual display of constantly changing tongue to palate contact over time, using an artificial palate plate covered with electrodes

The display of contact helps clinician guide client’s sound formation

Pamela’s /s/ (groove width)

Pre-treatment Post-treatment

Pamela’s /r/ (symmetry)

Pre-treatment Post-treatment

Flying 3D palates

From the UCLA Phonetics Lab (section III) We can look at change of contact during phrases

http://www.linguistics.ucla.edu/faciliti/facilities/physiology/epg.html

Phonemes and allophones

Allophone cartoon

/Phonemes/ and [allophones]

The single hardest concept in phonetics and phonology!

/Phoneme/: basic mental unit[Allophone]: actual realization of that unit

in a particular context or conditioning environment

Complementary distribution

Non-speech phoneme/allophones

Serving carrots Appropriate preparation for each course

Handwriting, esp. cursive How letters look in particular positions

More metaphors for allophones

/Shirt/ – choose for context [Formal shirt with collar] [Warm cozy hand-knit sweater] [Red t-shirt with rude saying] [No shirt at all – omission]

/Water/ – temperature is context [Liquid] ~ [Ice] ~ [Steam]

Allophones of vowels

Co-articulation, efficient planning yield overlap of articulations

English has oral vowel phonemes

But when an oral vowel occurs before a nasal consonant, it becomes nasalized

French nasal vowel phonemes

French vowels are contrastively oral or nasal

So the oral or nasal vowels give you a difference in meaning http://www.phonetics.ucla.edu/vowels/chapter14/fr

ench2.html

In English a nasalized vowel doesn’t give a difference in meaning

Free variation

Acceptable variation between realizations of a sound in same position

Two or more sounds in same environment, without a change in meaning and without being considered incorrect by native speakers

Examples: Released or unreleased stops at ends of words /t/ realized as glottal stop or as [t]

As opposed to “complementary distribution”

Allophones of consonants

Light and dark /l/ Lee vs. eel Onset vs. coda position

Fronted /k/ “coo” vs. key” Front/back position of following vowel

Dental /n/ Nine vs. ninth Preceding a dental consonant

Poster child for allophones: /t/

Many realizations of /t/ Some depend on environment

“top” “stop” “butter” “kitten” “hunter” “get your”

Some depend on attitude :) “get out”

Listen for these

Voicing and voice onset time (VOT)

VOT – Voice Onset Time

How voicing and aspiration contrasts are actually articulated

To understand this, we need the concept of articulatory gestures

Hearing voiced, voiceless, aspirated depends on relative timing of glottal gesture with respect to stop release

Articulatory gestures

Have a duration and a magnitude

Can be reduced or increased or overlapped

Some misalignment is perfectly natural Different articulators have different precision “Sluggish” velum vs. very nimble tongue tip

Other misalignment may be disordered http://sail.usc.edu/~lgoldste/General_Phonetics/CV_or

ganization/Gestural_Scores/index.html

Basics of plosives and VOT

www.phon.ucl.ac.uk/project/siphtra.htm Under Web Tutorials Plosives (Basics) Plosives (VOT and Aspiration)

2-way VOT contrast

EnglishLanguages can choose different cut off

points to make their VOT contrastsEnglish contrasts an aspirated stop

[voiceless] with a voiceless unaspirated stop [voiced], so it’s just a two-way contrast

3-way VOT contrast

Thai http://www.phonetics.ucla.edu/course/chapt

er6/thai/thai.html

Thai has phonemes of /p/, /ph/ and /b/

Thai contrasts an aspirated stop with a voiceless unaspirated with a voiced

4-way VOT contrast

Hindi http://hctv.humnet.ucla.edu/departments/lin

guistics/VowelsandConsonants/index/sounds.html

Voiceless, voiceless aspirated

Voiced, AND voiced aspirated Hindi has phonemes of /p/, /ph/, /b/, and /bh/

Summary of VOT contrasts

English has phonemes of /p/ and /b/

Thai has phonemes of /p/, /ph/ and /b/

Hindi has phonemes of /p/, /ph/, /b/, and /bh/

Languages can and do cut up the phonemes and allophones differently

Another piece of evidence that minimal pairs are crucial to show what’s contrastive in a language