The document discusses phonetics and phonemes. It reviews vowel and consonant articulation, demonstrates static and dynamic palatography techniques to visualize tongue placement, and explores the concepts of phonemes and allophones. Voice onset time is examined as a way to understand voicing contrasts in stops. Languages like English, Thai, and Hindi are shown to implement different numbers of voicing contrasts through varying voice onset time categories.

1. Phonetics ~ Class 9
CD 233
Lavoie

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

9. palatography

10. Palatography
What pattern does our tongue make on
our hard palate when articulating a
sound?
See additional handouts

11. Palatography yields …
Palatogram Linguagram

12. Capturing palate images

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

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)

16. /t/ /k/

17. Pseudopalate and digital display

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

19. Pamela’s /s/ (groove width)
Pre-treatment Post-treatment

20. Pamela’s /r/ (symmetry)
Pre-treatment Post-treatment

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

22. Phonemes and allophones

23. Allophone cartoon

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

32. Voicing and
voice onset time (VOT)

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

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