Advanced Phonetics and Phonology

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Lecture (1)

WHAT IS PHONOLOGY?

Structure UsePragmatics

Meaning(semantics)

GrammarMedium of

Transmission

Phonetics Phonology Morphology Syntax Lexicon Discourse

Structure of Spoken Language (from Crystal 1997)

Phonetics PhonologyStudy of the sounds of Speech

•Articulatory•Acoustic•Experimental

The study of the sound patterns in languages

•Phonemes (vowels and consonants)

•Prosody (stress, rhythm and intonation)

Phonetics deals with “actual” physical sounds as they are manifested in human speech, concentrates on

acoustic waveforms, formant values, measurements of duration measured in milliseconds, amplitude and frequency, the physical principles underlying the production of sounds, (resonances, the muscles, articulatory structures)

Phonology an abstract cognitive system deals with rules in a mental grammar: principles of subconscious “thought”

as they relate to language sound.

Phonology is concerned in the scientific study of: The sounds of a language.

Rules for combining sounds.

Variations in pronunciation.

The sounds of a language. Existence or lack of certain sounds in different languages

The case of secondary vowels the case of the interdental fricatives

The reality of these sounds (phonemes or allophones)

Rules for combining sounds to make words. certain combinations of sounds are allowed, but other combinations are

systematically impossible. The case of the sequences /br/, /bl/ in English Coining new words An accidental gap [lisg / amgala / ramut ] Loaned words psychologist

Variations in pronunciation. a phonological analysis will explain other general patterns in the

pronunciation of words the plural suffix –s on nouns in English is pronounced as [z] in bags, ways,

means..etc. The case of aspiration

Phonetics is about the concrete, instrumentally measurable physicalproperties and production of these cognitive speech sounds.

what are sounds, and how does one represent the sounds of languages?

two basic aspects of speech sounds as they are studied in phonetics, namely:

1. Acoustics: the study of the properties of the physical sound wave that we hear.

2. Articulation: the study of how to modify the shape of the vocal tract, thereby producing a certain acoustic output (sound).

Acoustic phonetics

is the study of the physical properties of speech sounds and how they are transmitted

Sound energy is a pressure wave consisting of vibrations of molecules in an elastic medium – a gas, a liquid, a solid; in this case, air

Acoustic phonetics

air particles are disturbed through the movements and vibrations of the vocal organs, especially the vocal folds. The process continues as a chain reaction for as long as the energy lasts.

Air particles move in the form of a wave: they are characterized by oscillation (repetitive variation) , frequency (hertz), amplitude and intensity (decibels).

Waveforms

The horizontal axis (time) represents time, with the beginning of each word at the left and the end of the word at the right.

The vertical axis (amplitude) represents displacement of air particles and correlates with the variations in atmospheric pressure that affect the ear.

How ‘loud’ are common sounds – how much pressure generated?

How ‘loud’ are common sounds – how much pressure generated?

Waveforms.

The difference between seed and Sid lies in their vowels (ee versus i), which is the part in the middle where the fluctuations in the graph are greatest.

Waveforms

Vowels are periodic, which means that the pattern of their waveform repeats over time.

The distinctive characteristics of the sound wave.

All sound waves are definable in terms of three properties that characterize a sine wave familiar from trigonometry, namely:

Frequency : how often does pattern repeat per time unit; measured in cycles per second also known as Hertz (Hz),

Amplitude : peak deviation of pressure from normal atmospheric pressure; measured in decibels (dB),

Phase : timing of waveform relative to a reference point; measured in the angular measure radians.

The distinctive characteristics of the sound wave.

The distinctive characteristics of the sound wave.

we can also graph the two important values for each of the component sinewaves, the amplitude and frequency. This is known as a spectrum

Spectra In these spectra, certain frequency regions are more prominent than others,

due to resonances in the vocal tract. Resonances are frequency regions where sound amplitude is enhanced. The frequencies at which these resonances occur are related to the length

of various parts of the vocal tract (ultimately related to the position of the tongue and lips as specific sounds are made).

Spectra The first three of these prominent frequency regions, called

formants.

Spectrograms. Another display, the spectrogram, shows both frequency andamplitude properties as they change over time, by adding a thirddimension of information to the display.

Spectrograms.

A spectrogram is a reasonably informative and accurate display of propertiesof sound.

It is less accurate than the spectrum at a single point, such as figure 7. A spectrogram is nothing more than a series of such spectra, The more detailed amplitude information represented on the vertical axis in

figure 7 is simplified to a less detailed and less reliable visual difference indarkness.

Another way to analyze speech sounds is in terms of the arrangement of articulators – the lips, tongue and other organs of the vocal tract required to produce a particular speech sound.

It is a fact of physics that a longer tube has a lower resonance frequencythan a shorter one.

The vocal tract can be treated as a series of tubes, where the resonancefrequencies of different tubes correspond to different frequencies offormants.

the length of the vocal tract in front of the constriction formed with thetongue determines the frequency of the second formant.

the length of the vocal tract in front of the constriction formed with thetongue determines the frequency of the second formant.

When the tongue is advanced as it is for the vowel in seed, the portion ofthe vocal tract in front of the tongue is rather short, and therefore this frontpart of the vocal tract has a high resonance frequency: and thus the vowelhas a high value for F2.

On the other hand, the vowel in pool is produced with the tonguepositioned further back, which means that the part of the vocal tract in frontof the tongue is relatively long – it is made even longer because when [u] isproduced, the lips are also protruded, which lengthens the entire vocaltract.

The effect of lengthening the front part of the vocal tract is that theresonance frequency is lowered, and thus the vowel in pool has a very lowvalue of F2.

The English word ground is composed of six distinct phonological sounds or, as they are called by

phonologists, segments. a spectrogram shows no physical boundaries in the stream of sound

pointing to exactly six distinct sound events. we find a continuously changing sound pattern, with the amplitude of the

signal being stronger at a given time at certain frequencies than at others –corresponding to formant frequencies.

A phonological analysis relies on an important idealization of languagesound, that the continuous speech signal can be analyzed as a series ofdiscrete segments with constant properties.

A phonetic representation can be given as a series of numbers, representingthe three acoustic essentials – amplitude, frequency and time .

or as an analogous description of the complex and continuously changinginternal geometry of the vocal tract.

Such a representation would be highly accurate, and is appropriate if thegoal is to understand the fine-grained details of speech sounds as physicalentities.

A phonological representation of an utterance reduces this great mass ofphonetic information to a cognitively based minimum, a sequence ofdiscrete segments.

the continuous stream of speech sound is converted into discrete units by phonetic transcription.

Phonology then can be defined as the study of higher- level patterns oflanguage sound, conceived in terms of discrete mental symbols,

Phonetics can be then defined as the study of how those mental symbolsare manifested as continuous muscular contractions and acousticwaveforms.

PRAAT

doing phonetics by computer

http://www.fon.hum.uva.nl/praat/

/ ði end əv klɑːs wʌn /