2. Today’s goals
Review articulation of vowels and
consonants
Understand phonemes and allophones
Experiment with Palatography
3. For yourself before we start
Write down:
Descriptors of vowels
Descriptors of consonants
Draw mid-sagittal sections of m and g
4. Review vowel articulation
What are the dimensions we use to
describe vowels?
Where do the English vowels fall along
those dimensions?
5. 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)
6. 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?
7. 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)
8. 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
13. 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/stati
c_pal_new/webpal.htm
http://www2.hawaii.edu/~vanderso/LDC.pdf
14.
15. 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)
18. 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
21. 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/physiolo
gy/epg.html
24. /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
25. Non-speech phoneme/allophones
Serving carrots
Appropriate preparation for each course
Handwriting, esp. cursive
How letters look in particular positions
26. 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]
27. 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
28. 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
29. 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”
30. 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
31. 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
33. 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
34. 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
35.
36. Basics of plosives and VOT
www.phon.ucl.ac.uk/project/siphtra.htm
Under Web Tutorials
Plosives (Basics)
Plosives (VOT and Aspiration)
37. 2-way VOT contrast
English
Languages can choose different cut off
points to make their VOT contrasts
English contrasts an aspirated stop
[voiceless] with a voiceless unaspirated
stop [voiced], so it’s just a two-way
contrast
38. 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
39. 4-way VOT contrast
Hindi
http://hctv.humnet.ucla.edu/departments/lin
guistics/VowelsandConsonants/index/soun
ds.html
Voiceless, voiceless aspirated
Voiced, AND voiced aspirated
Hindi has phonemes of /p/, /ph/, /b/, and /bh/
40. 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