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Social Sci LibreTexts

2: Sounds, Part 1- Phonetics

  • Catherine Anderson, Bronwyn Bjorkman, Derek Denis, Julianne Doner, Margaret Grant, Nathan Sanders, and Ai Taniguchi
  • eCampusOntario

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Learning Objectives

When you’ve completed this chapter, you’ll be able to:

  • Identify the locations and functions of parts of the human anatomy relevant to the articulation of spoken and signed languages,
  • Provide articulatory descriptions of given examples of phones and signs, and
  • Identify the meanings of many common symbols from the International Phonetic Alphabet.

A key aspect of any language is its physical reality in the world: how we transmit linguistic signals from one person to another. This chapter explores this physical reality by looking at the body parts used for language, how they move to create a linguistic signal, and how linguists categorize, describe, and notate these physical properties so they can record and access information about a language.

  • 2.1: Introduction to Phonetics
    The page discusses a video featuring Anne Sullivan explaining how she taught Helen Keller to speak, despite Keller being blind and deaf. The text highlights the importance of phonetics in language learning and pronunciation, using a poem by T.S. Watts to illustrate English's irregularities. It emphasizes how understanding phonetics aids in accurately describing and producing language sounds, rather than relying solely on written language.
  • 2.2: Modality
    The page discusses communication components, focusing on linguistic modality. It explains the communication process, from message construction to perception, in both spoken and signed languages. Spoken languages use a vocal-auditory modality, while signed languages use a manual-visual one. The text highlights the inclusivity shift towards incorporating signed languages in linguistic studies, despite traditional biases.
  • 2.3: Speech articulators
    The text provides an overview of the vocal tract and its role in spoken language. It discusses how the vocal tract, including lips, tongue, and throat, is depicted using midsagittal diagrams to understand speech articulation. The main regions of the vocal tract, like the oral, nasal cavities, and pharynx, are explained, highlighting their function in speech production.
  • 2.4: Describing consonants- Place and phonation
    This page provides an in-depth exploration of consonants as constrictions in phonetics, describing how they are formed with narrow constrictions in the vocal tract. It explains the roles of active (lower) and passive (upper) articulators and offers a detailed inventory of these articulators across global languages, such as lips and various parts of the tongue and mouth.
  • 2.5: Describing consonants- Manner
    This page discusses the manners of articulation for consonant phones, which involve different ways air flows through the vocal tract based on the constriction between articulators. It outlines five main manners: stops (complete closure), fricatives (narrow constriction), approximants (little or no frication), affricates (a mix of stop and fricative), and other manners like taps and trills.
  • 2.6: Describing vowels
  • 2.7: The International Phonetic Alphabet
    This page provides an extensive overview of the concepts of segmentation and transcription in phonetics, with a focus on the challenges of identifying individual phones within words and the necessity of using a standard notation system like the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) for accurate representation. It highlights the variability in pronunciation, particularly with English rhotics and affricates, and underscores the importance of typographic simplicity in transcriptions.
  • 2.8: Signed language articulators
    The document discusses the phonetic structure of signed languages, emphasizing that individual signs in signed languages don't have direct equivalents to phonemes in spoken languages. Signs are composed of interdependent articulatory properties like hand shape, orientation, location, and movement.
  • 2.9: Syllables
    The document discusses the concept of syllables in spoken languages, explaining their structure, notation, and role in linguistic organization. Syllables consist of a nucleus, often a vowel, and margins that can be simple or complex. The article also addresses the variability in syllable recognition among speakers and explores crosslinguistic patterns in onsets and codas.
  • 2.10: Stress
    This page discusses the role of stressed syllables in spoken and signed languages. Stressed syllables in spoken languages often feature increased loudness, duration, and pitch. In signed languages, stress may involve greater tension and movement speed. The page debunks the classification of languages as "stress-timed" or "syllable-timed." It covers degrees of stress, marking stressed syllables with primary, secondary stress, lexical versus predictable stress, and stress patterns.
  • 2.11: Tone and intonation
    The page discusses the concepts of pitch, tone, and intonation in spoken languages, emphasizing their roles in stress systems, word meanings, and conversational functions. It explains the distinction between tone languages and intonational languages, describing various tone notation systems such as IPA diacritics, tone letters, and non-IPA superscript numbers. Examples from languages like Bemba, Igala, and Awa illustrate tone patterns, including high, low, mid, and contour tones.


This page titled 2: Sounds, Part 1- Phonetics is shared under a CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 license and was authored, remixed, and/or curated by Catherine Anderson, Bronwyn Bjorkman, Derek Denis, Julianne Doner, Margaret Grant, Nathan Sanders, and Ai Taniguchi (eCampusOntario) via source content that was edited to the style and standards of the LibreTexts platform.

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