Phonetics 1:Articulatory Phonetics
Class Slides
This week, you will use a combination of readings and interactive
phonetics websites to familiarize yourself with the basics of
articulatory and acoustic phonetics.
Readings
Language Files 2.0-2.4
Exercises
Do exercises 7-26 in file 2.8. They are all for practice, and they are
designed to help you understand how language sounds are produced, to sensitize you to
the sounds of spoken English, to alert you to the mismatches
between these sounds and the English orthographic system, and to move
you towards a familiarity with the international phonetic alphabet as
a representation of speech sounds.
Homework
Here's the phonetics homework
assignment due Monday, October 3, at the beginning of class.
You will find the following websites particularly useful
for learning articulatory phonetics:
The University of
Iowa offers an interactive articulatory phonetics website, which
shows a moving sagittal view of the articulatory organs pronouncing
the sounds of English.
Check out, also, the website of the International Phonetics
Association for the complete IPA Alphabet
The UCLA Phonetics lab has a vast phonetics website, which
includes recordings of the sounds of many languages. Check out
(i.e. listen to) a selection of vowels and consonants from a variety
of languages that you may
never have heard before in the
index of sounds.
The UCLA phonetics site also has an online IPA chart that
allows you to click on the symbols and hear the sounds.
Totally Optional
Mark Liberman has written a particularly good
introduction to
phonetics and phonology for his introduction to linguistics. We
recommend it highly.
Karen Chung has a page with a variety of resources on some
kinds of consonants you'll be unfamiliar with:
ejectives, implosives and clicks
The Exploratorium has a page that shows how
a duck
squawk can
produce vowels when passed through plastic resonant chambers. This
page will give you a good idea of how resonating chambers are
configured in the human vocal tract to produce different vowel
sounds.
If you want to learn a little more about the physics of
speech, visit the Georgia
State Hyperphysics site.
If you want to see how articulatory phonetics is put to work
in animation, see this animation page.
If you want to mess with spectrograms yourself, download the
free Praat acoustic phonetics software.
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