notes for phonetics and phonology

1. Phonetics and its Branches
Sadia Malik

2. Background
• Millions of years of evolution have resulted in an amazing instrument: the
human voice.
• The voice can be used to inform, persuade, trick, console, and change
emotional states.
• “Speech was the best show man puts on.” (Benjamin Lee Whorf, 1956)
• Dennis Fry (1977) considers Homo loquens (Man, the Talker) as a better
label for modern humans than Homo Sapiens (Wise Man/Clever Human).
• The process of speech communication is, in part, dependent on the nature
of sound.
• The sounds of all the languages of the world together constitute a limited
set of sounds that the human vocal tract can produce.

3. Phonetics
• It is the study of sounds used in speech: their physical properties, the
way they are received, and coded by the brain, and the way they are
produced (Rowe & Levine, 2006).
• Phonetics is concerned with describing the speech sounds that occur
in the languages of the world, how they fall into patterns, and how
they change in different circumstances (Ladefoged, 1982).
• The first job of a phonetician is to try to find out what people are
doing when they are talking and when they are listening to speech.

4. Phonetic Domain

6. Daniel Jones’ Opinion about Phonetics
• I gradually came to see that Phonetics had an important bearing on
human relations – that when people of different nations pronounce
each other’s languages really well (even if vocabulary & grammar not
perfect), it has an astonishing effect of bringing them together, it puts
people on terms of equality, a good understanding between them
immediately springs up.

7. Speech Sounds
• To describe the speech sounds, it is necessary to know what an
individual sound is and how each sound differs from all others e.g.,
cat, pit, sand, etc
• The ability to analyze a word into individual sounds does not depend
on knowledge of spelling.
• Ambiguity can be faced in analyzing/segmenting sounds, for instance:
• Not/knot
• Psycho
• Grade A/gray day
• The sun’s rays meet/The sons raise meat.

9. Spelling & Speech
• Alphabetic spelling represents the pronunciation of words.
• However, Orthography does not represent the sounds of words in a
language systematically.
• Identify the sounds/letters representing the sounds recurring in the
following sentences:
• Did he believe that Ceaser could see the people seize the seas?
• The silly amoeba stole the key to the machine.
• My father wanted many a village dame badly.

10. Spelling and Sounds
• Did he believe that Ceaser could see the people seize the seas?
• The silly amoeba stole the key to the machine.
• My father wanted many a village dame badly.
• To avoid this confusion, in the science of Phonetics, each
distinct sound must have a distinct symbol to represent it
and each symbol must represent one and only one distinct
sound.

11. The Phonetic Alphabet
• The discrepancy between spelling and sounds gave rise to the
movement of “spelling reformers” called orthoepists. They wanted to
revise the alphabet so that one letter would correspond to one sound
and one sound to one letter, thus creating a phonetic alphabet to
simplify spelling.
• In 1888 the interest in the scientific description of speech sounds led
the International Phonetic Association (IPA) to develop a phonetic
alphabet to symbolize the sounds of all languages.
• Henry Sweet played the major role in producing a phonetic alphabet.

12. The Phonetic Alphabet
• Since many languages use a Roman alphabet like that used in the
English writing system, the IPA utilized many Roman letters as well as
invented symbols.
• These alphabetic characters have a consistent value, unlike ordinary
characters.
• A phonetic alphabet should include enough symbols to represent the
“crucial” linguistic differences.
• Among the symbols of the IPA, 107 letters represent consonants and
vowels, 31 diacritics are used to modify these, and 17 additional
signs indicate suprasegmental qualities such as length, tone, stress,
and intonation.

13. Purposes of IPA
• It represents a universal system for dictionaries to follow for
explaining the pronunciation of words.
• It records a language in a linguistic framework.
• It provides a basis for a writing system for a language.
• It can annotate acoustic and other displays in the analysis of speech.

15. Consonants in IPA

16. Vowels in IPA

17. Suprasegmental features in IPA

18. Unit of analysis in Phonetics
• Phone (distinct sound represented by distinct symbol)
• [pæt] square brackets to represent phonetic transcription.
• Diacritics marks are notations added to the main phonetic symbol to
clarify details of pronunciation.

20. Branches/Domains of Phonetics
Acoustic Phonetics
• Study of the physical
properties of sound
e.g., amplitude, wave
length, frequency,
duration etc.
• Knowledge relies on
anatomy and
physiology
Auditory Phonetics
• How sounds are
received by the ear
and decoded by the
brain.
• Focuses on the
listener
Articulatory Phonetics
• Study of the
production of the
speech sounds
• Deals with the
sender

22. Acoustic Phonetics
• The study of acoustic phonetics was greatly enhanced in the late 19th
century by the invention of the Edison phonograph. The phonograph
allowed the speech signal to be recorded and then later processed
and analyzed.
• Further advances in acoustic phonetics were made possible by the
development of the telephone industry. (Incidentally, Alexander
Graham Bell's father, Alexander Melville Bell, was a phonetician.)
During World War II, work at the Bell Telephone Laboratories (which
invented the spectrograph) greatly facilitated the systematic study of
the spectral properties of periodic and aperiodic speech sounds, vocal
tract resonances and vowel formants, voice quality, prosody, etc

25. Auditory Phonetics
• the perception of sounds by our auditory apparatus and the
transforming of the information into a neural sign and its sending to
the brain
• the analysis of this information by the brain which eventually leads to
the decoding of the message, the understanding of the verbal
message
• Important anatomical parts include outer ear, middle ear, inner ear,
and neurons in the brains and relative parts in the brain that decode
information.

26. Auditory Phonetics
• Keeping it very simple, we can state, that any sound coming from any
source, be it a door slamming or someone speaking to you, is
spreading from that source as a sound wave, causing the molecules
on its way to crowd together and move apart again or in other words,
to vibrate.
• When these vibrating air molecules reach your ear, they cause the
eardrum in your middle ear to vibrate, too and this vibration is then
carried on from the eardrum to the three little bones: mallet, incus
and stirrup.

27. Auditory Phonetics
• From the stirrup, the vibration is carried on to the inner ear, and into
the cochlea, a little coil-like organ filled with liquid. Inside the cochlea
there are two membranes: the vestibular membrane and the basilar
membrane. It is the latter that plays a central role in the act of
audition, because this is, where the auditory receptor cells are
located.
• The cells on the basilar membrane convert these vibrations into
neural signals that are transmitted via the auditory nerves to the
central receptor and controller of the entire process, the brain, where
we identify the incoming sound as actual sound with a specific pitch.

29. Articulatory Phonetics
• Study of the production of speech sounds
• Studies the movement of different articulators (speech organs) in the
production of different types of sounds
• Source of Airstream
• Airstream Movement (outward or inward)
• Structures of the respiratory and digestive systems

30. Organs of Speech