Examine the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) and how speech sounds are represented; Explore sound segments ‘phonemes’ and sound combinations; Explain the distinction between phonemes and allophones; Discuss the suprasegmental features including length, stress, and pitch as well as syllables; Apply the learned knowledge in helping students improve L2 pronunciation.

1. Chapter 4: Sound Patterns
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2. LEARNING OUTCOMES
• Examine the International Phonetic Alphabet
(IPA) and how speech sounds are represented;
• Explore sound segments ‘phonemes’ and
sound combinations;
• Explain the distinction between phonemes
and allophones;
• Discuss the suprasegmental features including
length, stress, and pitch as well as syllables;
• Apply the learned knowledge in helping
students improve L2 pronunciation.
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3. Linguistics
Sounds Structures
Phonetics/
phonology
Morphology/
syntax
Meaning
Semantics/
pragmatics
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4. KNOWLEDGE OF THE SOUND SYSTEM
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 When you know a language, you know the sounds of
that language and you know how to combine those
sounds into words, as well as to segment that sound
into its parts.
• Ex. Sounds:‘t, p, o and s’, are combined form
the words tops, stop, spot or pots.
• Phonological knowledge, which all speakers of all
languages have, includes the ability to identify speech
sounds and combinations from your own language and
recognize others as different from your own language. It
tells you whether sound sequences make an actual
word, like black,or a non-word, like *blick, and which
ones aren’t legal combinations, like *lbick

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The study of the sounds of speech can be divided
into the disciplines of phonetics and phonology.
• How are speech sounds made?
• How many different sounds do languages use?
• How does sound travel through the air?
• How is it registered by the ears?
• How can we measure speech?
Phoneticians
ask questions
• How do languages organize sounds to distinguish
different words?
• How do languages restrict, or constrain, sequences of
sounds?
• What sorts of changes (alternations) do sounds undergo if
sequences arise that don’t obey the restrictions?
• How are sounds organized into larger constituents
(syllables, words, phrases)?
Phonologists
ask questions
Fasold, R. W., & Connor-Linton, J. (Eds.). (2014). An introduction to language and linguistics. Cambridge university press

6. What is Phonetics?
Articulatory
properties
• deals with
how the
speech
sounds are
produced or
articulated
Acoustic
properties
• deals with the
physical
properties of
speech as sound
waves in the air
(what they sound
like)
Auditory
Properties
• deals with the
perception,
via the ear, of
speech
sounds (
perceptual
phonetics),
1. The scientific study of speech sounds;
 is concerned with the physical production
and perception of speech sounds.
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• To describe speech sounds, it is necessary to know the
characteristics of an individual sound and how each
sound differs from all others.

7. What is Phonology?
Phonology …
a. is the study of how sounds pattern in a
language;
b. studies how languages organize sounds
into different patterns (Fasold & Connor-Linton,
(2014).
Describes the ways we can discover the
unconscious systems underlying speech.
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Did he believe that Caesar
could see the people seize
the seas?
• The same sound is represented
variously by e, ie, ae, ee, eo, ei,
ea
My father wanted many a
village dame badly.
• Here the letter a represents the
various sounds in father,
wanted, many, a, village, dame,
badly.
INTRODUCTION

9. INTRODUCTION
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Roles of linguists
•Linguistics is concerned primarily
with the spoken word.
•So our first step in phonetics will be
to learn to use a system of written
symbols that linguists have
developed for representing the
speech sounds of any language.
English
spelling is
highly
irregular:
•The same letter can represent
different sounds, or the same
sound can be represented by
different letters.
•Thus, the English alphabet is
not able to accurately represent
sounds that are not in English.

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Linguists use one of the
many specially devised
systems of notation in
which one symbol
represents one sound –
the International
Phonetic Alphabet (IPA)
IPA:The phonetic
alphabet designed by the
International Phonetic
Association and used to
represent the speech
sounds found in all
human languages.
INTRODUCTION

11. Why Do We Need A Phonetic Alphabet?
 A phonetic alphabet (the International Phonetic
Alphabet (IPA),
 Solves these problems by representing each sound in
human speech with a single symbol.
 Uses a phonetic alphabet enables us to transcribe spoken
language consistently and accurately.
 Writing down sounds using a phonetic alphabet is called phonetic
transcription.
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IPA
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• The reason why language teachers learn
phonetics:
• Familiarize with the phonetic inventories;
• Be interested in properties of sounds in
different languages;
• Help their students to accurately distinguish
and produce different sounds.

12. The International Phonetic Alphabet
(IPA)
• A number of IPA symbols are borrowed
from the conventional written alphabet:
• [b] as in ‘bird’ / [d] as in ‘dog’
• Other symbols are variations of
alphabet letters:
• [ɒ] as in ‘hot’ is an upside-down a.
• [ŋ] as in ‘bang’ is a combination of n and g.
• [ı] as in ‘hit’ is a small-size capital I.
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13. THE INTERNATIONAL PHONETIC
ALPHABET (IPA)
• Sometimes obsolete letters are used:
• [ ∫ ] as in dish.
• Other symbols are from the Greek alphabet:
• [θ] as in thin,
• A few symbols are inventions:
• [ɬ] Welsh ll as in Llanelli.
• Sometimes supplementary marks (known as ‘
diacritics’) are added to the symbols. For example,
two dots indicate length:
• [uː] (long u ) as in boot.
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14. SORTING OUT THE BASIC SOUNDS
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Find a suitable
informant (a reliable
native speaker from whom
to gather samples of
speech), focusing on
the accurate
transcription of
sounds, dealing at
first with single
words such as nose,
mouth, house, tree, sun;
As the sounds
of the language
under
investigation
become
familiar, the
linguist will
transcribe
more and more
accurately.
The informant is
ringing the
changes on a
relatively small
number of basic
sounds or
phonemes, each
of which may
have several
variant forms.
A linguist is working on an unknown,
unwritten language.

15. SORTING OUT THE BASIC SOUNDS
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... is the smallest segment of
sound which can distinguish
two words.
What is
phoneme?
Pairs of words such as pit and bit , pit and pet which differ by
only one phoneme in the same position, known as minimal
pairs, and one way to identify the phonemes of any language is
to look for minimal pairs.

16. SORTING OUT THE BASIC SOUNDS
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• English has 44 (24
Consonants and 20
vowels) according to a
well-known analysis of one
widely spoken variety of
British English, known as
RP.
Phonemes
• The standard form of
British English
Pronunciation, based on
educated speech in
Southern England, widely
accepted as a standard
elsewhere.
RP
What is ‘Received Pronunciation’ (RP)?

17. SORTING OUT THE BASIC SOUNDS
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English has 44 (24
Consonants and 20
vowels) according to
a well-known
analysis of one
widely spoken
variety of British
English.

18. 45 SOUNDS
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19. Phonemes
• … a unit of sound
that makes a
difference in the
meaning of a word.
• Slashes /… / are
used to enclose
phonemes
• The phoneme, /p/,
is the
representation of
the sound in the
mind of the
English speaker
Allophones
• … are predictable
variant form of a
phoneme.
• Square brackets […]
are used for
allophones.
• The allophone, [pʰ] of
[p], is how that mental
representation is
produced in actual
speech depending on
the phonetic
environment.
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Consider the /p/ of English:
• Hold your hand or a piece of paper in front of
your mouth and say the words pit and spit.
• When you pronounce pit you should feel a
puff of air on your hand that you do not feel
when you say spit.
• Making this puff of air is called aspiration.
• We call the p in pit aspirated and
transcribe it using a small raised [ʰ] after
the [p] = [pʰɪt]
• The p in spit is unaspirated and is
transcribed with a regular [p] = [spɪt].

21. TEACHING IMPLICATION
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22. This is where the ESL teacher would come in.
Unconscious
Knowledge
• While native speakers of English
know when to produce aspirated
voiceless stops and when to produce
unaspirated voiceless stops, they are
not explicitly taught these rules.
EFL/ESL
Learners
• Foreign/second language learners
do not have this knowledge and
need to learn the rule explicitly if
they want to pronounce voiceless
stops appropriately.
Explicit
Teaching
• By teaching the aspiration
rule in English voiceless
stops, teachers can help
their students improve
their pronunciation.
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23. SOUND COMBINATIONS
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• Every language has certain
permitted sequences of sounds,
and others which are not allowed,
known as Phonotactics.
A word which begins with three consonant-type
phonemes always obeys three strict rules:
• The first phoneme must be /s/.
• The second phoneme must be /p/ or /t/ or /k/.
• The third phoneme must be /l/ or /r/ or /w/ or /j/.
• spring, string or splendid (*bdling, *sgteal or
*wbtendid)

24. Suprasegmentals (also known as Prosodic Features)
• Consonants and
vowels can be
thought of as
the segments
that make up
speech.
Suprasegmentals
• Over and above
these segments are
other features
known as
suprasegmentals:
Phonological
phenomena that
are larger than a
single Sound.
Length Stress
Pitch:
intonatio
n & tone
syllable
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25. WHAT IS PITCH (also called FUNDAMENTAL FREQUENCY) ?
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• is the rate at which the vocal cords vibrate, which
allows listeners to position a sound on a scale from
high to low.
• In English, a change in pitch does not change its
meaning but can change syntactic function.
• Ex. The class has been cancelled.
• from a question to a statement, from a statement
to an expression of surprise, from an expression
of surprise to a statement of doubt, or any
combination of these.
• Languages that function this way relative to pitch are
called intonational languages.

26. TWO TPYPES OF PITCH
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• refers to pitch movement
that is not related to
differences in word
meaning.
• Many languages,
including English, use
such pitch variations to
convey surprise,irony,
and questioning.
Intonation
• differences that
change the meaning
of a word.
Tone

27. DURATION
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• Sounds can be brief or comparatively long.The
length of a sound is known as its duration.
• The colon [:] placed after a vowel indicates
‘length’.
• The position of the tongue in the mouth can
influence the length of a vowel (e.g., high vowels
generally have a shorter duration than low
vowels).
• In addition, vowels that come before voiced
consonants are of longer duration than vowels
before voiceless consonants.

28. WHAT IS STRESS?
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… refers to the different ways in which we
can give a phonetic segment more
emphasis of certain syllables in a word.
 Indicate a grammatical function.
1. ínsert versus (to) insért,
2. cóntrast versus (to) contrást,
3. présent versus (to) presént,
 Emphasize certain words in expressions:
1. She’s wearing a pínk dress (not a blue dress).
2. She’s wearing a pink dréss (not a suit).

29. Multisyllabic Word Stress
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English uses several levels of stress in
multisyllabic words:
1. démocràt, [ˈdɛməˌkræt],
2. demócracỳ, [dəˈmɑkrəˌsi],
3. dèmocrátic, [ˌdɛməˈkræɾɪk],
4. dèmocrátically [ˌdɛməˈkræɾɪkli]
 Stress Types:
• An acute accent [ˊ] placed over the vowel marks
the most prominent or primary stress
• whereas a grave accent [ˋ] marks the second most
prominent or secondary stress.
 In IPA, [ˈ] is placed before the beginning of a syllable
with primary stress, while [ˌ] is placed before the
syllable with secondary stress.

30. SYLLABLES
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A syllable is a unit of
pronunciation. Linguists identify
three parts to the units (See Table
6.4).:
• an onset (optional),
• a nucleus (obligatory),
• a coda (optional)
• A word is composed of one or
more syllables, and a syllable is
in turn composed of one or more
phonemes.

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SYLLABLES

32. Syllables
Onset
 consonant(
s) at the
beginning
of a
syllable
Rime (rhyme)
 vowel and any
consonants
following it at
the end of the
syllable:
 are further
divided into two:
Nucleus & Coda
Nucleus
 vowel
that is
the
minimu
m unit of
the rime
Coda
 consona
nt(s) at
the end
of the
rime
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33. SYLLABLES
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• English has four main types of syllables defined by
characteristics of sounds contained in the rime.
• A single
vowel is
followed by a
consonant
sound
• Ex. pan,picnic,
shape,cube.
Closed
syllables
• When a
syllable ends
in a single
vowel
• Ex. see and veto
Open
syllables
• Syllables that
contain two
vowels (i.e.,
glides or
diphthongs)
• Ex.name,boy,and
know
Diphthong
syllables
• the vowel is
followed by
either an /r/
sound or an /l/
sound.
• Ex. paper,
daughter,whisper,
table,apple
Syllabic
consonant

34. SYLLABLES
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There are some basic patterns that
determine where polysyllabic words in
English split into syllables.
English words follow one of five basic patterns.

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What are Word Families or Phonograms?
… a letter or a sequence of letters
that represents a sound, a syllable,
a rime, or a series of sounds.
• bank,blank,sank,tank, and thank belong to
the same -ank word family;
• -ank is also the rime for the syllable/word.

36. • Improving pronunciation in
an L2 requires learning not
only the features of individual
consonants and vowels but also
the suprasegmental features
that extend across multiple
segments in an utterance.
• Remember that L2 pronunciation problems are often
rooted in differences between what constitutes a phoneme
or a syllable in L1 versus L2.
• Ex. Many Spanish speakers will substitute: /ʃ/ with
/tʃ/, and pronounce shock as chock and wish as witch.
• Consequently, it is helpful for teachers to become familiar
with the phonology of the student’s native language.
Help Students Improve Their Pronunciation in L2
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